Legendary Resident Evil 2 mastermind Hideki Kamiya has showcased what he calls “the biggest Platinum boss fight ever” while demoing the Japanese studio’s new game, Scalebound.
Anyone who’s played the distinctly underwhelming TMNT: Mutants In Manhattan would be right to roll their eyes at that boast, but here’s the thing: the co-op action on show at Microsoft’s E3 2016 press conference does look pretty damn spectacular.
The action sees Dante-alike lead character Drew battling an ginormous spider-crab-hydra thing with a pulsating, glowing heart. (Hmm, wonder how we take it down?) It kicks off with Drew (under Kimaya’s control) having little luck firing bows into the beast’s back, but an unnamed colleague has more success by slinging bombs. (Each successful strike throws up a number to show how much damage has been done.)
The sense of scale is so huge that it’s often difficult to see what’s going on, but at one stage Drew clambers onto the beast’s back to land some crucial blows, and is even catapulted onto a limb by a dragon pal Thuban – from where he hacks happily (and grueomely) at a bloody, bruisey mass.
It’s about patience as much as all-out slash-hackery, mind – the beast’s behaviour patterns include disappearing under water, cocooning itself inside an even-more-comically-huge shell and spitting poison. It’s after evading said poison that the battle climaxes, with both human characters able to converge upon (and destroy) that pulsating heart after the spi-cra-dra (my word, not theirs) is momentarily felled.
Still not sure about the main character’s Beats-by-Poundstretcher headphone choices, but this hints at a return to Bayonetta form for Platinum – and about time after *that* Turtle shower.
Scalebound is released on Xbox One and Windows 2010 (and cross-compatible via Xbox Play Anywhere) in 2017.
