Apparently we've taken a long enough break from World War II games to be able to enjoy them again. That's the word from Steve Hart, a developer at Rebellion, the chaps who created Alien vs. Predator, the upcoming Neverdead, and who are currently working on Sniper Elite V2.
SEV2 is set in World War II. Funny that Hart should have such an opinion, but I'm put it down to good old fashioned eerie coincidence and leaving it at that. Any further analysis of the situation would no doubt lead to dark discoveries so spooky that they'd see me going outright mad, running screaming into the night like the fevered, knowledge-burdened protagonist of a Lovecraft story.
Above: To be fair, World War II + tactically imparted Mortal Kombat x-ray gore I can back
Speaking to GamerZines, Hart explained, "...I think the market is ready for World War Two. You've seen the extra press the likes of Red Orchestra 2 have gotten because all of a sudden WW2 is a breath of fresh air whereas modern conflicts perhaps aren't"
"...It just so happens that our timing for a World War Two game is better than others out there, and gamers are ready for that now. Even better for us is that we're coming out before perhaps another Call of Duty set during World War Two, as I'm sure we'll be seeing another one of those at some point"
A fair point. Kind of. We're no longer drowning on brown and grey, mud-encrusted WWII shooters like we were a few years ago. Instead we're drowning on brown and orange, sand-caked modern military shooters. But is the best course of action really to jump back to the '40s, in the same way that we jumped to the modern era to get away from the '40s in the first place?
Obviously there's room for games utilising any setting or time period. And Rebellion's original Sniper Elite was decent, very different spin on the historical FPS, so there's no reason to believe its new one won't be. It's certainly looking rather great at the moment. But we really could do with coming up with a better approach to the FPS genre than another chronological knee-jerk, before another fad-wave starts to build.
Like, you know, just not doing the whole me-too thing at all, and coming up with fresh, creative ideas.
Nah, what am I saying? That'll never catch on.
