Preview: Sci-fi neo noir takes charge in Bruce

Preview: Sci-fi neo noir takes charge in Bruce

Cyberpunk noir is back in style. With Ghost in the Shell releasing soon and Blade Runner 2049 later this year, it’s a genre that is making a nice resurgence, especially in gaming. Publisher IMGN.PRO and developers Logic Artists look to capture that style in Bruce, an upcoming 2D action platformer coming to PC & consoles.

Bruce takes place in the near, technofied future where augmented humans and detectives mix, sometimes with violent results. Designed as a 2.5D platformer, the game tasks us with rescuing the love interest of Bruce, the title protagonist, who has fallen in with people she shouldn’t have and now want her dead. The plot sounds like something straight out of the early Eighties, when the genre was first taking hold on cinemas, but really only serves as a means to move us along. The meat of the game is in the action.

As we hop and run across platforms and roofs, we can climb up or down, fistfight or shoot, and hack our way into doors and rooms. There is verticality and depth, launching us up or down as we race to the right. And even with all that movement the progression feels like our actions are tactical and not just parkour. That’s because we need to figure out the best path to get to the end, based on the tools and abilities we carry, instead of just jumping like Mario.

The game explores cyberpunk themes through Bruce’s trench coat, which is loaded with technology. We can upgrade it to hack into machines, cloak ourselves, or just improve our defense. One ability slows down the world around us, allowing us to better time our attacks. It feels a little like Deus Ex, if it was a sidescrolling platformer, but with more action and less plot.

Bruce captures the noir feel pretty well, capitalizing on the trench coat fashion, atmospheric lighting, and even the mood-inducing rain. The cyberpunk elements are a light touch, adding to the action and not the environment. There isn’t a lot of depth in the experience, but right now it seems like it’s aiming more to hit a design aesthetic than a gameplay one. Bruce is still early in development (it has switched dev teams) and there is a long way to go before it really gets flushed out. But, from a conceptual standpoint, it could be on to something.

Bruce is still planned for a 2017 release date on PC and consoles.