GDC 2010: Hands-On Preview: The Grinder - Preview
by VGChartz Staff , posted on 17 March 2010 / 4,527 Views
We met up with High Voltage Software at GDC last week to take a look at their two new games, Tournament of Legends, and The Grinder. While they both started out as Wii exclusives, The Grinder has had a radical makeover, switched camera angles, and gone multiplat. We hopped right into the XBox 360 version of the game for some 4-player co-op to find out what was going on.
The Grinder mixes sci-fi, campy monster movies, and westerns into an arcadey co-op shoot-'em-up stew. It's like the Adventures of Brisco County Jr. in Zombieland. Unlike other zombie games, you're not playing as the only survivors in an isolated area. You're actually professional monster hunters, hired by the mayor of a city to stop its monster outbreak. The mayor had even built his own monsters to help run the city (like the Frankenstein monster below), but those have gone haywire as well, as all monsters must.
All four players can switch between two regular weapons and two magic weapons, so you have your pistols and shotguns along with your other magic monster-mashing guns. The magic weapons have limited ammo, so I was usually keeping to the pistols, or switching around often. The regular weapons have special types of limited ammo too, like silver bullets and wooden bullets. These are important to use sparingly as well, since I was often surrounded by werewolves and vampires. I also found some dolls, which can trick certain types of monsters that prefer baby brains to monster hunter brains.
The enemies got smarter pretty quickly as we ran through the early part of the game. The early grunt monsters ran right at us and got mowed down, but the next wave of monsters teleported directly behind us before they attacked. This made all 4 of us keep on our toes instead of just speedrunning through a zombie horde. Later on there's a monster with ranged attacks who would teleport specifically into shadows before it started shooting.
These screens are all fairly early in the game, when you're fighting monsters on some platforms and bridges high in a canyon above the city. You can usually see deeper into the game as you play, not just to tingle your acrophobia, but to give you a sense of your direction. Throughout the game you'll be climbing deeper into and below the city as you search for the source of the monster outbreak, and I assume eventually for your reward.
We only got to demo this first short area, up until the first Frankenstein. It definitely passes the first-five-minutes-are-fun test though. We'll have to wait for more information as the game gets closer to release.
The Grinder will be coming to PC, PS3, XBox 360, and Wii Halloween 2011. These screens are all VGChartz exclusives courtesy of High Voltage Software, and a few more are available here.
There has been some confusion recently as to whether this new genre switch from FPS to top-down shooter for the PC, PS3, and XBox 360 versions mean the Wii version will remain an FPS or not. We asked High Voltage's Art Director, Matt Corso, if he could clarify this for our readers, and he told us he can't say yet, because they're just not sure yet. But Corso told us he wanted to make one thing clear: "High Voltage Software is not cheating its Wii fans, and we will keep providing quality content."
In fact, Corso said it would be great if they could get as much feedback as possible from their Wii-owning fans.
So Wii fans, Conduit fans, High Voltage fans, what do you think? Let us know in the comments if you want to see The Grinder for Wii as a top-down shooter or first-person shooter.
