If you’ve been craving a game where you can play through an adventure featuring dynamic hack-and-slash, anime sword-fighting, you’ll probably find that there’s only a meager offering available whether you play on PC or home console. Well, Seasun Entertainment’s Project Code: Shift for PC and Xbox One seems to be the answer to the question that anime fans have had for a while: where are all the really cool anime sword-fighting games?
The title was revealed during this year’s E3, and they only very, very, very briefly had a showcase during the Microsoft ID@Xbox indie spotlight that aired within the E3 press conference. Separate from the conference, the team at Seasun uploaded the actual gameplay footage and a new gameplay trailer to help give gamers an idea of what to expect from the new side-scroller. You can check out the E3 trailer below.
Personally? The fights where he’s just taking on one or two enemies at a time is where the game really shines. It looks fantastic in motion, and the fact that they’re using 3D models but animating them as if they were 2D sprites really helps give the game both high-quality visual fidelity but with all the smoothing benefits that we usually find from hand-animated games.
We’ve been seeing this technique get put into practice more and more as developers model and sculpt their characters in 3D but then use various tricks and tactics to either lock the animation set to key-frames or they rasterize the 3D characters and animate them using standard techniques oftentimes found in 2D titles.
Either way, Project Code: Shift looks fantastic in motion, and the fluidity of the combat and the dynamic anime-style sword-fighting really pops on-screen, especially set against those gorgeous backdrops.
You can see a slightly alternate version of the first trailer with the second trailer below, which features a more in-depth look at the combat system and gameplay mechanics.
Unfortunately there is no release date in sight, but hopefully this game will stay on the radar for a while leading up to its release. Oftentimes a lot of really cool games like this end up getting lost in the shuffle, so it’ll be nice if this stays slightly above the water.
We’ll keep you posted on new updates for Project Code: Shift as they become available.
