Ubisoft announces Beowulf game

Due out in film form this November, Beowulf is also crashing into the world of videogames. Not bad for a heroic epic poem composed at a time when one of the great British traditions was attempting to hit passersby with the contents of your slurry bucket. By which we mean the Middle Ages, history-phobes, not last week in South London.

According to publisher Ubisoft, the game will "reinvent the hack'n'slash genre," which is a bold boast. If it's at least as good as The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, complete with God of War-style flowing combat, we'll be happy.

Our man on the ground at Ubisoft's Paris games event tells us the game will be developed by Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter team members at Ubi's France HQ, even though a totally different developer had originally started work on the project.

Will it feature Grendel? Will it feature Grendel's hairy mother? Will we be diving deep into blood-polluted waters and breathing from gloopy trapped air-bubbles as we strive to slay the family of man-eating beasts? Well, if it doesn't, then we've all been short-changed.

May 23, 2007

Ben Richardson is a former Staff Writer for Official PlayStation 2 magazine and a former Content Editor of GamesRadar+. In the years since Ben left GR, he has worked as a columnist, communications officer, charity coach, and podcast host – but we still look back to his news stories from time to time, they are a window into a different era of video games.