Since parent company Midway ran into serious financial difficulty, its Newcastle development studio has been dangling in limbo. If a buyer does not come along soon – and soon in terms of days rather than weeks – the team will be dissolved, its 70-plus staff joining the hundreds of other game developers who’ve cleared their desks in recent months as the squeeze of the global recession has tightened.
The UK’s recruitment agencies have been circling for some time, attempting to pick off Midway Newcastle’s talent, but almost entirely without success. The team want to remain a team, and as we visit their offices on the outskirts of Gateshead the mood is quietly industrious, Necessary Force’s developers are assembling the component parts of a game that is considerably more ambitious, and more obviously loaded with potential, than their last production, Wheelman.
What we're seeing in the developer’s demo room is the result of only three months' work, yet there is plenty to see, and in remarkably stable, consistent form. The action opens in a city at night stabbed through by a profusion of light sources, the environment illuminated by car headlamps, overhead streetlights and the occasional probing beam from a passing police helicopter. It is a world away from Wheelman's sun-baked Barcelona, not only because it's so forebodingly dark but also because it's tipping down with rain, slickening the neighbourhood's streets and its dilapidated architecture, home to an assortment of grade-A scumbags and their dirt-poor victims.
As a police officer assigned to this beat, you're looking at a clean-up operation, which due to the game's construction will play out literally. As you eliminate criminal activity to make these streets safer, we're told, they will transform. The ubiquitous graffiti will be scrubbed away. Boards will be removed from windows. Entire buildings will be replaced with shiny new constructions, putting a shop, say, were once there was a tumbling-down tenement. Progress will be measured visually, then, but the plan is also to feed into the game’s mechanics, a selection of overhauled locations playing parts in your investigations. Right now, though, as our demo continues to play out, it’s clear that there is a lot of police work to be done before this area becomes anything other than a grubby hellhole.
In terms of overall graphical style, the studio is going for ‘neo-noir’, taking influence from the likes of Sin City at one end of the spectrum and LA Confidential at the other, with a shady helping of Se7en from somewhere in the middle. The contrast between light and dark certainly conjures up a David Fincher kind of vibe, but the characters within the gameworld are more comic-book in style. The time period, meanwhile, is 'near future', but one as imagined in the '80s, with the grit of Robocop, not the slickness of I, Robot.
The demo kicks into gear and Necessary Force’s as-yet-unnamed hero gets into his squad car and heads off in pursuit of a felon, whose whereabouts are relayed by radio contact with HQ. The city streets feel narrower than those of Wheelman, the more enclosed spaces heightening the city’s sense of oppressiveness. The perp is located and a clattering, lamppost-mangling chase ensues before he dumps his car and heads off into a back street on foot. It’s a scenario Midway Newcastle intends to form a kind of backbone to the game, with more emphasis placed on action outside of vehicles than inside.