With the recent release of Crisis 3 and Deadspace 3 and the ever nearing release of even more AAA titles such as SimCity, Tomb Raider and the Starcraft expansion: Hearth of the Swarm its hard to keep track of much else. But if you manage to Alt- tab out for a minute and have some spare change you might enjoy one of these promising Kickstarter projects
1. XING: The Land Beyond
XING is a myst styled walk- around adventure and puzzle game, featuring a first person point of view similar as the one found in Skyrim. The people behind XING are White Lotus Interactive, an Orange, California based student development team, with XING being their first shot at making a game. The Kickstarter page page goes out on a stretch to emphasize the focus on the atmosphere, which is supported by the lack of combat, spoken dialogue and a minimalistic UI. The story is told through poems in the form of stone etchings found all around the world, the access to which is restricted through into the environment integrated puzzles. The games Kickstarter ends on April first with just about half of the necessary funding missing. If you are a fan of the myst series or any other puzzle centered game I highly recommend to consider backing the project.
2.PROJECT AWAKENED
Project Awakened offers a whole different approach to the Max Payne and Tomb Raider dominated genre of third person shooter games. In development at the Chicago based company Phosphor Games Studio, which mainly consists out of several experienced developers from the now closed Midway Games, the game will run on the new Unreal 4 engine and includes an interesting set of features. The main feature of the game is going to be an insane amount of customization regarding character creation, abilities and modding. The character and ability customization allows for anything from a Cyborg Ninja to a Hulk like player character, but visuals and abilities is not all there is to this system. Depending on how you create your character it is going to have influence on missions or even the overall storyline. The storyline itself is set somewhere in the close future and focuses around a world in which different factions including governments and businesses wrestle for power. As for the grand question: Will we be able to play with other people? The answer is maybe, the Kickstarter still runs until March 6th, but still lacks around 300,000$ of funding and the fully customizable multiplayer is only noted as a potential stretch goal.
After an exciting year of creative games being sponsored on Kickstarter, the trend continues with Project Awakened and XING only being two of the great games which have arisen out of Kickstarter already this year. If you have the coin I highly recommend browsing through the vast amount of game related projects.
