Gameloft takes a stab at assassination with their new free-roaming title.
Imagine that you’re a british navel officer in the 18th century. Life is good as you go along with your merry swashbuckling adventures. Good, until your best friend betrays you, imprisons you, and steals away your fiance. This is the start of the dark tale of revenge that is Backstab, which feels like a game that was strongly “inspired” by Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series of games. A bad thing? Not necessarily, considering how good those games are!
You’re put into the shoes of Henry Blake, the aforementioned British officer, and a man dedicated to justice until things take a turn for the worse. In the demo I played, I got to slice through soldiers, peasants, or anyone else who got in my way. Since I played an intro level, I wasn’t able to get too deep into the combat/counter system, but (as you see in the video), I somehow stole a soldiers rifle and shot him with it during a fight. Sweet. While there will always be quests to direct your path, we were told that the game’s four cities are filled with random encounters to keep you occupied. Also, much like Assassin’s Creed, you will see a rating based on how much your break the law, which in turn will alert authorities to your presence. It’s up to you whether you stalk the streets as a mass-murderer, or stick to the shadows and only assassinate your specific targets.
Although it’s not shown in the video, I was able to climb the sides of buildings and leap from rooftop to rooftop to reach my goal. The free-running mode felt very fluid, with an option to manually jump, or rely on an auto jump that activates when you run off the edge of something. You can climb up and around most buildings, which felt pretty good, and allows for quick escapes from encounters. My final destination was a cannon mini game that had me shooting at incoming soldiers as they rowed to shore. This segment lasted far too long, but the Gameloft rep warned me of this before going in, as Backstab is not quite yet final for the iOS devices. Throughout my brief journey there was a large amount of voice acting, all pretty good from what I heard. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t feature any sort of lip-syncing, which surprised me considering that Gameloft’s other upcoming title, 9MM, has good lip-syncing rather than static faces.
The idea of setting you lose to free-roam on a Caribbean island, interacting with (or killing) NPCs and completing missions, sounds really cool to me, and I really hope Gameloft can pull it off. Unfortunately, what I played of Backstab did not feel finished at all. I ran into tons of camera and animation glitches that really distracted from the otherwise great-looking environments in the game. (Some of these can be seen in the video below.) Combat also seemed a bit confusing at times, but mainly due to the aforementioned animation/camera bugs. I was surprised to hear that Backstab has actually already been out on the Xperia play for a couple months, and that it’s very close to release on iOS devices as we speak. This has the potential to be a really cool, somewhat open action experience for the iDevices, and I really hope that the final version looks more polished than when I got to play. I loved Assassin’s Creed, and I would really like to love Backstabbed when it comes out at the end of Q2 or beginning of Q3 this year.
