If you’ve ever thought that football would be better with violent robots (and honestly, who hasn’t), you’re in for a treat.
Indie development studio Mode 7 is best known for their brain-bending dystopian strategy game Frozen Synapse. It may come as a surprise, then, that their newly announced upcoming title Frozen Endzone appears to be a sports game at first glance. However, despite the lack of guns and explosions, Frozen Endzone has more in common with its beloved predecessor than you might think.
Veterans of Frozen Synapse will be familiar with its simultaneous turn-based gameplay. Frozen Endzone mirrors this predictive element of strategy, but instead of commanding a squad of commandos, you’ll be coaching a team of five robots competing in a futuristic variation of American football. The deceptively simple goal is to get the ball into your opponent’s endzone. You’ll need to direct your robotic athletes to block, tackle, and intercept to control the randomly-generated playing field and secure victory for your team.
Lead designer Ian Hardingham sees a number of fundamental similarities between the fast-paced tactics of Frozen Synapse and modern sports titles, noting the shared factors of short play sessions and emergent randomness. With Frozen Endzone, he aims to lower the barrier to entry of the (admittedly hard to grasp) Frozen Synapse, while retaining its strategic depth. Eager fans can dive into customizing their individual bots with bolted-on upgrades over a story-driven single-player campaign, but quick five-minute skirmishes against other players or AI should provide plenty of replayability.
Frozen Endzone is currently up for voting on Steam Greenlight, and Mode 7 plans to hold a pre-order beta with completed single- and multi-player skirmish mode. Pre-order revenue will fund the development of the game’s campaign, which will put players in the shoes of a team’s coach who, unlike the faceless protagonist of Frozen Synapse, will be “a defined character with a story.” The title will be released sometime in 2014, though there’s no word yet on how soon we’ll be able to get our hands on the beta.
Source: PC Gamer
