DeNA (Rage of Bahamut) has just released a new video for their next project, The Drowning.
The game, which is a horror first-person shooter (FPS), is natively built for mobile devices and as such, the DeNA team hope to “finally give gamers a true high-definition FPS experience on their iPads or iPhones”.
“The Drowning is a revolutionary FPS game for mobile devices, experienced through the eyes of one of the few survivors of a mysterious global catastrophe. Fighting for survival in a world where unexplained oil spills have transformed millions into soulless creatures, players craft and upgrade a powerful and unique arsenal of weapons as they work together and alone to explore, survive and dominate.”
This is the first project led by industry veteran and free-to-play visionary Ben Cousins from DeNA’s Scattered Entertainment studio in Sweden, and the game’s talented development team has worked on many best-selling console shooter games such as Halo, Crysis, Battlefield and Far Cry.
In the video you can see Ben demonstrate how the game’s simple one-handed, two-finger controls make for a much more intuitive and enjoyable mobile control scheme. Want to shoot your weapon? Just tap the screen with two fingers and the bullet is fired at the center point of those two fingers. It makes for more skill-based shots, especially when tracking long distance targets. To look around you swipe with one finger anywhere on the screen. Movement is accomplished just by tapping where you want to go, and more frequent taps allow for finer control over movement. Pinch to zoom in on your targets. Ben says that the controls are easy to learn, but will take practice to master.
Playing The Drowning is all about mastering the already familiar gestures of taps, swipes and pinches; using just two fingers on one hand, players can shoot, look, move and zoom.
The video just goes over the basic controls, and there are more details that will be revealed at a later date. In my opinion, these gesture-based controls look like they’d be very comfortable and could be a very welcome change from the screen-blocking virtual stick controls we’ve seen on iOS FPS titles thus far.
We don’t have any details on when the game will be released other than it will be in early 2013 and the game will be free-to-play.
The Drowning Controls
Announcement Trailer
