Announced on November 28th, Vengeance Hunters is the first Neo Geo beat 'em up to ever grace the system since 2003. The game is being developed by the newly formed Nalua Studio, and Vengeance is their first game. The team, despite not being the largest, counts on professionals from all around the world, including names like Thomas Mc Cloesky, the pixel artist behind games like Shredder's Revenge and Toxic Crusaders.
While there's not much information about the game, I could get early access to the press release, which I will reproduce here, with the available screenshots.
If you prefer to listen to me summarizing it all on video, there's one right here:
Overview:
Vengeance Hunters is an arcade-style Beat’em’up brawler that has old-school flair and looks combined with newer gameplay design methodology. Select among three characters in a
one or two-player Co-Op game and fight your way through five levels of challenging enemies, traps, mini-games, and tough boss encounters. Collectibles, unlockables, and replayability are all key parts of the Vengeance Hunters. Vengeance Hunters is the first game from Nalua Studio which is composed of a team of people from around the world.
Characters:
Vengeance Hunters stars a cast of rebels and villains who are drawn in an early 90’s arcade
style. Pixel art with the look of a Saturday morning cartoon. Player characters and enemies all have unique abilities and attacks.
Graphics and Animation:
We made the artistic choice to limit ourselves to the capability of older arcade hardware (SNK’s Neo-Geo was used as a reference) but push the limits as much as possible. We have a lot of level animation which includes things like 2D lighting animation, rain, parallax scrolling, and limited scaling. All entirely capable on an arcade machine of the era.
All animation in Vengeance Hunters is hand-drawn pixel art that is era-appropriate.
This includes all stages, effects, characters, bosses, and mini-games.
Variety:
Vengeance Hunters has three playable characters with entirely different mechanics, five levels, five bosses, three mini-games, secret areas to discover, collectibles, a high score system, a combo system, and unlockable modes. As well as unique dialogue per character you choose to play during the game. Each level has at least one secret collectible to find in order to achieve not just the highest score, but also unlockable modes and features.
As mentioned above, there will be a few between-stage or pre-boss fight mini-games to allow the player another form of interaction with the game for added gameplay variety.
Gameplay:
Vengeance Hunters has Beat’em’up roots firmly planted in era-appropriate arcade and console games like “Final Fight”, “Streets of Rage”, and “Cadillacs and Dinosaurs”. They, among others, were all inspirations for the direction we took in regard to gameplay mechanics. However, we didn’t want to simply copy games of that era and instead
used modern design philosophy in regards to our gameplay systems and mechanics to create a fluid and modern feeling game that doesn’t have to rely on cheap or overly hard gameplay in order to artificially inflate the run time or take even more quarters from the players. Our game features a four-action button setup. A light attack, strong attack, jump, and “signature move” are all assigned to the face buttons.
You can also dash, perform dashing attacks, ground combos, aerial combos, off-the-ground bounces, wall splats, wall bounce juggles attacks, desperation moves, and Co-Op team setups. Players can cause all kinds of havoc on the screen and feel powerful while doing it.
The game also features a “signature move” that is unique to each playable character.
Our wrestler archetype has a multitude of throw options that can be performed both while grounded and in the air. Our speedy assassin has a cartwheel that speeds her up, gives her some invulnerability frames to get away, and allows her to perform moves like a brutal attack to grounded foes as well as knock airborne enemies back into the air for more air combo action. Our final character specializes in ranged combat with his Missile Fist “Fissile”
attack that knocks airborne enemies around the screen and can even knock grounded enemies back up into the air for more damage potential. Our goal was to make the game extremely fast and fluid and allow the players to be very creative in the moment and give them as much flexibility as possible to do what they want to do.
Audio:
The game will have a featured title track, each level has its own musical track, boss-specific music, and an ending track. There is a wide range of different sound effects for all the different attacks, enemies, bosses, and some digitized speech that is appropriately “bit-crushed” for the era.
Modes of Play:
Vengeance Hunters features up to two-player simultaneous play via couch Co-Op. The second player can drop in at any point in the game. There will be three difficulties for the
player to select. Training stage that allows players to practice combos and techniques.
Replayability:
The game features three distinct and unique characters with a huge amount of combos and interactions to learn. Players can also choose to get friends and family involved in Co-Op action which drastically changes the dynamics of the game and makes it descend into frenetic chaos of enemies, and sometimes players, flying all over the screen. Each area will have a secret to uncover as well as a secret item to find. This will lead to further unlocks that will change gameplay and give more options to the player. Trophies being included will also give trophy hunters quite a bit of incentive to replay the game with all three characters and find all secrets and collect all the items.
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