Airship Syndicate’s Battle Chasers could be one of the dark horse releases of the year. It’s due out this fall for the Xbox One, PS4, PC and Nintendo Switch, and gamers were able to see nearly nine minutes worth of gameplay footage that was captured during this year’s E3.
The footage was uploaded over on IGN’s channel, featuring some of the gameplay and strategies that players can employ throughout their adventures. You can check out the video below.
The video starts with Calibretto and Garrison conversing about the Iron Outpost they’re invading.
Instantaneously, you’ll notice that the art-style and background art is extremely similar to other new-school classics like Bastion. There’s a soft-saturation approach to the tonal maps, so everything has this watercolor painted look.
As players explore the map they can switch between the three playable characters in the party, which includes Calibretto, Gully and Garrison.
Enemy encounters are visible on the actual overworld, and when they touch the player character a turn-based battle will commence.
Turns are visible on the side of the screen during combat. You can see which character will go next, which allows you to prep your strategies and plan ahead as to how you’re going to link moves or combo attacks.
The battle sequences are highly animated, and you can tell the animators had a lot of fun bringing both the hero characters and enemies to life. The hand-animations are mirrored after what you would expect a living, breathing comic book to be like.
Players have standard Actions, Abilities, Burst moves and Items to use during combat. If things start going really sour, you can tuck tail and cower from combat by fleeing.
One of the things that really stood out is just how difficult the enemies are. It may be turn-based but you can’t sleepwalk through the fights at all.
After charging up the SP high enough, you can unleash special Burst moves that can heal teammates or deal extra damage to enemies.
The special Burst attacks remind me a lot of Chrono Trigger and the team techs.
If the exploration, maps, and story are as high quality as the character art and background designs, the game could be a worthwhile purchase. My only gripe is that it looked like the texture filtering was set pretty low. Hopefully the PC version will have anisotropic filtering to raise the quality on the character textures, because on the close-up Calibretto, you can definitely see how blurry and muddy the textures are on the characters up close.
If you’re interested in the game, you can look for Battle Chasers: Nightwar to launch on PC, PS4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch starting October 3rd, 2017.
For more info feel free to visit the official Kickstarter page.
