One of the most visually striking games of last-gen was Lab Zero’s Skullgirls. The game stood out due to its beautifully hand drawn animated style. This is something that the developers are doing once again with their follow up title: Indivisible. I got a chance to check out the game at a 505 Games event last week and loved what I saw thus far.
In the demo, you start off playing as a girl named Ajna. I actually stayed on the title screen for longer than I should have since I thought it was still part of the intro. As soon as I pressed the analog stick to the right, Ajna started moving and the game began. This is a 2D side scrolling game so everything is based on this visual perspective. The backgrounds are rendered in three dimensions but the characters and their movements are strictly two dimensional. This doesn’t mean that the game is limited in any way however.
Indivisible is an action RPG similar to Valkyrie Profile. You attack in real time but have a cooldown period for attacks. As you progress however, you’ll unlock more attack bars so that you can do more moves. Holding a direction when pressing the dedicated action button for your character will let you do different moves. Even with Ajna, I was able to combine attacks on enemies who were scattered along my path.
As I played, more characters became available, totaling to four. Each character’s attacks were assigned to one of the four face buttons which made it easy to keep track of who I wanted to attack. This is when the game became very interesting because I was able to do long strings of multi-hit combinations on foes. As I kept playing, the characters gained more abilities and were able to have even flashier attacks. Let me tell you right now, I almost had a zen-like moment when I had all of the characters at my disposal and I unleashed so much destruction upon my enemies.
Unlike a lot of crowd funded projects which only have concept art or videos to show prospective buyers, people can actually download a playable prototype of the game now. This is actually what I played and it felt no different than a proper game. This is a great way to get the fans to know exactly what they’re investing into.
Though this game is still a bit away from meeting its goal of $1.5 million (it’s at $240k at the time of this writing), it should hopefully reach that goal when the campaign ends in 31 days. Here is to hoping it does meet its goal because this is a very cool and stylish game that’s just a blast to play. Hopefully since 505 Games is helping out with this project, it will give it a better chance of being successfully funded.
With so many games trying to be as photo-realistic as possible, it’s nice to have a game that puts a unique style out there. Hand drawn and animated games are a rare breed so I’m thankful that something like Indivisible exists. I know that crowd funded games have gotten a bad wrap lately, but I think this is one that people should definitely invest in since it’s such a cool and unique thing to play.
