Eight months on from our very first look at Blitz Games` zombie title, TVG goes and visits the team at the UK dev booth at E3...

During the first (and as it now transpires, the only) EGN conference in 2004, TVG managed to get a very early sneak peak at a next-generation title from the Britsoft company, Blitz Games. Founded by the Oliver twins who’d been responsible for everybody’s favourite 8-bit egg, Dizzy, Blitz had been showing off some of the conceptual work for Possession, which had originally been conceived as a current generation title before making the shift over to the next-gen formats. At the time the company were trying to attract a publisher and financial backing for continued development, and nine months on TVG went to meet the team at the UK State of Play booth at E3 2005.

A new take on the zombie genre, Possession sees gamers take control of twisted anti-hero the Enslaver who seeks revenge on those who turned him into the monster he’s become; discovering his ability to create and control zombies, the Enslaver heads to the city streets hell-bent on revenge…

During the EGN presentation, the team showed a mock-up of a hospital and demonstrated some of the damage modelling on a generic zombie. Whilst it was very impressive to see the dual-layer skin textures that Blitz had previously announced actually working, the demonstration was essentially a tech demo and the thought of seeing how far the company had progressed with the project was something that was most intriguing. As it turns out, and as you’d expect, Blitz have spent a lot of time focusing on evolving and streamlining their ideas, and it’s refreshing to see the game finally taken out of the hospital and into the streets of the anonymous city. The protagonist of the game, “The Enslaver” had been bulked out in the past few months and was no longer the emaciated figure of the EGN demonstration. This time around Blitz also explained the breakdown of the various zombie groups set to appear in the game.

Beginning with the ‘Shamblers’, Blitz explained how this group of zombies were inspired by the classic stereotype zombie: slow moving corpses, but with the neat twist that they retain their human weapons if they died clutching them. ‘Runner’ zombies are very much the modern day variety, the sort of walking dead that appear in the re-make of Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later. This group of zombies are able to leap from vehicles and are certainly being built up by Blitz as deadly and nimble. Somewhat disgustingly, the third group of zombies, called ‘Bloaters’ are decaying masses that have literally bloated as a result of the breakdown of the body creating various noxious gases that have the potential to infect a large group of people. Moving on to the menacing ‘Shredders’, these wall crawlers have the ability to climb sheer surfaces enabling the player to get an aerial or wall eye view of the game world; Shredders can also be used to set up ambushes by the player, resulting in massacres. Finally, the ‘Monster’ zombie group have the ability to tear away at defences and vehicles alike, but the trade off is that unlike the other group, they no longer have the ability to turn humans into fellow zombies.

Blitz has publicised the fact that during the course of the game players could find themselves in command of hundreds of the undead, so if Possession is to achieve its full potential on the next-gen consoles, the integration of an intuitive and solid control system will be imperative. Demonstrating with an Xbox controller connected up to a test PC, it soon became obvious that the control system was an area of Possession that Blitz had certainly spent a lot of time thinking about. Using the trigger buttons and a cross-hair, it’s quite straightforward for players to select and control anything from one zombie to a large group of zombies and that the speed of these selections is also quite quick, means that this part of the system certainly seems solid enough. As well as the zombie selection system, the team have also been implementing a command system through the d-pad so that players can order the zombies to either Attack, Guard, Follow, and Mutate. Having been given the opportunity to try out this very early preview, it has to be said that the control system that had raised some concerns at EGN 2004 had been streamlined into something quite solid.

The city is split into three districts with Police headquarters, an Army base, and Media stations all ready for zombie destruction, but perhaps the most intriguing are the addition of laboratories that will be dotted around the 6 square miles of game world described as being similar to Freedom Fighters. These labs enable the Enslaver to become increasingly more powerful, allowing him to upgrade and mutate his zombie army – which can only be bad news for the human inhabitants still remaining in the city. Blitz also described some of the planned AI for Possession that included defensive changes based on the tactics and movements made by the Enslaver, and the addition of ‘Corporate Black-Ops’ who have the aim of hunting down the Enslaver and forcing changes to attack strategies.

The Single-Player mode of Possession is set to bring together a series of genres including first-person-shooter, third-person action and real-time strategy as players direct the Enslaver to city-wide destruction through the anticipated 12 hour long ‘campaign.’ A lot of the game is set in a third-person perspective, although Blitz are integrating two features that will certainly add a perspective to things – quite literally. Gamers are able to possess any of the zombies in the game, changing the perspective to first-person and leaving them free to pick off any victim they choose, which means that the game offers a wide level of control to the player. Also, in what can only be described as a homage to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead movies, Possession features an ‘Angry Cam’ where players can fly-through the game world to strategically view enemy positions. Both of the these features were demonstrated at the presentation at E3, and it has to be said that they certainly added a unique dimension to the game. Whilst it’s easy enough to run around the city streets as the Enslaver and command the zombie hordes running brainlessly towards any human on the pavements, skilful use of the Angry Cam is surely set to become useful when it comes to planning the next move against the Military and next set of victims. The abilities reinforce the idea that the game isn’t a simple action game where just commanding the zombie hordes to rush towards the next set of victim – there is a strong strategic element in the game that should provide gamers with a strong learning curve as they progress through the city streets.

Perhaps an even more exciting prospect than the single-player mode is the very intriguing Multiplayer mode, which was emphasised at the EGN presentation, and only really mentioned during the course of the E3 2005 demonstration. Some of the maps already being planned for the multiplayer mode include The Mall, The City Streets, The Old Farm, and The Military Base, all of which offer plenty of ‘last stand’ action as the seven player-controlled survivors try and hold out against the eighth player’s zombie army. The seven survivors will be stuck in a first-person perspective whilst the eighth player will take the single-player third-person view, which is a definite nod to the philosophy of the Splinter Cell multiplayer elements, really boosting the tension felt the ‘survivors’ with their disability to see what’s going on behind their backs…