Hands-On: City of Brass
We’ve been in an Arabian mood since we started playing Sonic and the Secret Rings on TSSZ Plus, so finding City of Brass at PAX East this year was pure serendipity. Developed by independent Australian studio Uppercut Games with veteran staffers from the Bioshock series, City of Brass is a first-person, dungeon crawler-esque adventure game set in a world heavily based on the Arabian Nights. You play as a thief fighting to reach a grand treasure in the middle of a dangerous city. Armed with a whip and a multitude of melee weapons, you must fight your way through hordes of enemies and stay alive to claim your prize.
The main focus of City of Brass is utilizing the whip and the city’s environment in interesting ways. Your whip is primarily used to stun and trip enemies, thus making them easier to attack and defeat, but its usefulness extends beyond that. The whip can also activate traps and serves as a method of swinging around levels, Indiana Jones-style. Once your enemies are stunned or otherwise rendered immobile, you can hack away at them with your melee weapon or push them into the myriad of traps scattered around the level, and this process repeats through each stage.
These traps and interactive level elements are key to the game’s design and flow. Levels will commonly feature spike traps that shoot out of the floor and cause damage to you and enemies alike. Flammable reservoirs and pots can be whipped from a distance, creating large explosions that will engulf nearby baddies. Elemental weapons and whips were teased in screenshots, but we were not able to try them for ourselves. All of this encourages you to move through the game methodically; if you’re racing through a stage, you’ll miss opportunities to kill enemies in more creative ways, and you’ll surely run into your fair share of spike traps as they are a common sight throughout. Intriguingly, these levels are procedurally generated, so players will experience different layouts with different puzzles and hazards; this will ostensibly keep you on your toes more than static layouts that can become familiar over time.
The core gameplay works well, though it’s not without its quirks. By and large, whipping is an effective way of keeping foes at a reasonable distance, though there were a few instances of what appeared to be a direct hit on an enemy not registering. Enemies generally don’t pose a challenge by themselves, but large numbers of them can threaten your progress, especially when combined with projectile-shooters that often attack from a distance. As in many dungeon crawlers, death starts you back at the beginning of the game, so keeping track of your health is critical. The Arabian-inspired levels certainly look and feel as they should; screenshots of the game show more varied environments at different times of day, which may help the graphics from becoming too repetitive. Ultimately, the brief slice of gameplay we tested showed a solid foundation for City of Brass; what remains to be seen is how well this foundation translates into a full game.
City of Brass is available in Early Access on Steam now. The full release is coming to PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 on May 4th.
