Recoil: Retrograd screens revealed

Morten Iversen is not a household name. Unless, of course, your house happens to be in Denmark and you happen to be named Mrs. Iversen. But it is nonetheless a name worth learning if you're a fan of the Hitman series or the cult classic "Russia invades America" game Freedom Fighters, because he wrote them. And now he's at it again with a new company (ZeitGuyz) and a new game for PC and next-gen consoles: Recoil: Retrograd.

The hard details on Recoil: Retrograd will have to wait until next week's Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, where Iversen and company will be shopping the game to prospective publishers. But these first few screens have our keen, detective-y minds betting it's some kind of muskets-and-cannons-era shooter.

The setting is a mystery - we see both red and blue coats in the screens, and the odd spelling of "Retrograd" has us wondering if there's some alternate timeline Russia in the water. Iversen explored similar themes in the Red Dawn-alike storyline of Freedom Fighters, and it worked admirably even without Patrick Swayze's hair or Charlie Sheen's squint helping propel the plot along. We can't yet tell whether any of Hitman's stealth elements or Freedom Fighters' squad play will reappear in Recoil: Retrograd, but it's powered by Unreal Engine 3, so whatever you do is guaranteed to look lovely. In a murky, bloody, gangrene-prone Revolutionary War-type sense, at least.