Wartorn is a top-down fantasy tactics game co-created by BioShock's lead designer, inspired by a forgotten Bungie title where you command dwarves to blow up zombies
When was the first time you noticed physics in a video game? For me, it wasn't bifurcating a headcrab-zombie with a saw blade in Half-Life 2, or seeing a Cleaner goon collapse into a stack of shelves in Max Payne 2. It was watching a bunch of zombie limbsroll down a hillside in Myth 2: Soulblighter.
Bungie's fantasy tactics game was best known for the chaos created by its bomb-throwing dwarves, and I distinctly recall being mesmerised by how their ordnance would scatter undead body parts across the game's undulating pastoral landscapes.
The Myth series has long been eclipsed by Halo's stratospheric success, but the Dallas-based Stray Kite Studios remembers it well enough. The developer's newly announced game Wartorn channels the frantic decision-making and kinetic combat of Myth and its sequel, and as one of the three other people who remember Bungie's fantasy series, I am very excited indeed.
Wartorn sees players assuming control of two elven sisters travelling across a conflict-ravaged landscape on a personal quest to find their family. That's according to Stray Kite's press release, which also explains that along the way, they'll have to «confront moral dilemmas and battle external and internal threats». Given there's only two of them, I'm not sure how internal threats will work exactly, unless the sisters have a big falling out, or catch a stomach bug from drinking improperly purified water.
The trailer released alongside the announcement doesn't provide much insight into Wartorn's narrative side, but it reveals plenty about the combat. The bits that struck me as particularly Myth were the arrow-barrage ability around 30 seconds in and the moment an ogre slams its club into the ground just before the minute mark, triggering a shockwave that scatters several unfortunate gobbos across a field like hayseed.
Yet there's plenty here that diverges from Bungie's template, too, such as a strong emphasis on elemental abilities, like fireballs and a nifty-looking
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