Leaping from the pages of the Arabian Nights, adventure awaits in the accursed City of Brass – a place of legend beneath the sand, filled with danger and reward. Infested with mischievous spirits and deadly traps, its shifting streets are brimming with the wealth of a nation.
Players assume the role of a cunning thief, battling to reach a fabled treasure at the city’s heart, wielding a blade and whip that can be used to disarm, trip or stun enemies, to swing to safety, grab inaccessible objects or even break through flimsy barricades. But the city itself also has teeth. Players have to leap across pits, slide under blades, dodge spears or arrows, evade or employ sprung paving slabs, and sidestep poison gas traps – all the while manipulating these hazards to their advantage against diverse supernatural foes.
City of Brass has eternal replayability, designed to encourage combinative gameplay within an ever-changing, carefully optimized cityscape. Gamers must learn to manipulate every system if they are to survive, moving swiftly and deftly through each level, balancing the need for loot with the absolute requirement to escape within the time limit.
“Developing a game with multiple, interacting systems that players can freely combine feels like a return to our roots, drawing on our experiences working on BioShock and many of our other favorites,” explained Ed Orman, Lead Designer. “Players must learn how to use the traps to kill their foes, and even turn enemies against each another. You’ll perish in the City of Brass – often, and quite horribly – but as your skills improve and you discover new ways to cheat death, you’ll return to fight another day.”
• Collect treasure to increase your score, plunder chests for weapon and armor upgrades or powerful relics – but make it to the exit in time or face death by dervish…
• Incarcerated within the city, and most are friendly… Some will barter gear, upgrades, secrets, unlocks or protections in return for loot. Use one of three wishes to unlock a powerful benefit, or for a king’s ransom, buy a genie’s freedom in return for help in the final battle.
• When your sword just isn’t enough, get creative: smash your enemies with explosive vases, blind them with a brick to the face, or force them into traps.
• The city is filled with wretched spirits of all flavors, all with unique behaviors, all with the singular character defect that they want to kill you.
• The algorithms that create each level are tweaked to generate a logically laid out cityscape of interconnected chambers, courtyards and corridors.
• The rhythmic interplay of blade and lash has been carefully tuned along with sprinting, crouching, sliding, leaping and vaulting to give a fluid, balanced and natural feel to the movement and melee.
• For the ultimate test, experienced players can encumber themselves with Divine Burdens, global modifiers that change enemy abilities, spawn behaviors or multiply environmental hazards.
• No two playthroughs are ever the same: play, die, and play again, each time using what you’ve learned to get further. Are you tenacious enough to reach the heart of the City of Brass?
City of Brass will be released for Windows PC on Steam in fall 2017, with versions for PlayStation 4 systems and Xbox One following in 2018.
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