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Perhaps my favourite combat in any first-person shooter would be the tense cat-and-mouse skirmishes of Monolith's 2005 cult classic F.E.A.R. The cunning enemy AI, glorious slow motion and exaggerated particle effects that turned the most banal office into a warzone alongside my favourite video game shotgun ever combined to make this otherwise bog standard action game into a near classic. Now, a six-person studio headed by ex-Monolith devs is creating a new first-person shooter IP in Betrayer, which, for better or worse, sounds nothing like F.E.A.R.Where F.E.A.R. was all about feeling completely badass (which probably explains why it wasn't scary at all), Betrayer is going to make you feel weak and vulnerable as you navigate its stark black & white rendition of 1604 Virginia. Speaking with Blackpowder Games' creative director Craig Hubbard, I'm told it will be more along the lines of Metro 2033 than Monolith's 2005 love-letter to John Woo.
Much of this is due to the haunted setting, where you must rely on early 17th century weaponry. Hubbard says he was inspired by the action scenes in The Last of the Mohicans. "It's just so fluid and so brutal," he explains. "Just the way they'll fire a shot, then they'll drop the musket and pick up another one. You don't actually drop a musket in the middle of combat [in Betrayer], but you can carry multiple weapons, so you can be flipping between loaded muskets and then switching to your bow and then throwing an axe and meleeing."
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