Spine’s new trailer, shown at today’s PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted, is a flurry of over-the-top street fights with bullets and black belts in equal measure.
While the game’s twitchy character action brawling is reminiscent of hand-throwing brawling games like Sifu, Spine has one immediately obvious innovation: Guns! The dystopian cyberpunk future might be a bummer, but at least you can draw the intersection between Zen martial artistry and a 9mm pistol using a masked bad guy’s face as your canvas.
The trailer doesn’t show off a ton of new information about the game, which PC Gamer staff writer Harvey Randall saw "glimmers of potential that rattle and shake under the weight of an early build" when previewing Spine back in September. But it does show off a ton of snazzy takedowns, slow-mo dodgerolls, and fluid action sequences that seamlessly blend firefighting and fistfighting.
It also shows some novel uses of a combat spray paint can, clouding enemy vision and blasting exosuit visors with graffiti. Protagonist Redline is just as quick to grab an enemy’s gun and start blasting as she is to disarm them with a quick flurry of blows or fire at some explosive hazard in the room, in a fighting style that embraces an improvisational, freeform spirit.
While the visually dazzling combat is clearly a trope-infused tribute to gun fu action flicks like John Wick and Desperado, the cyberpunk world looks like a bold, colorful backdrop for this kind of action. The Steam page hypes up a highly reactive camera built to simulate a blockbuster experience, whether you learn toward guns, as in biceps, or guns, as in guns.
Spine – This is Gun Fu’s release date hasn’t been revealed yet, but the game can be wishlisted on Steam.
