The Warriors: Hands-on Preview

Kikizo dons its red leather jacket and takes to the streets to visit Rockstar for a hands-on preview of the upcoming movie licensed game. New gameplay videos inside!

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The Warriors film was released in 1979, and has since become a classic in the eyes of many. The setup is pretty basic: a street gang are framed for murder, and must then make there way across New York, to the safety of their home turf on Coney Island.

It doesn't sound like much of a film, until you add that every other Big Apple gang is gunning for them. It isn't difficult to see what urged a game developer to snap up the licence, as it already sounds like the beginnings of a game design document. It also isn't hard to see why that developer was Rockstar, considering how close it feels to the rest of the company's output.

Rockstar has been sitting on the license for about seven years, just waiting for the right time to put it to use, waiting until they were sure the game could do justice to its inspiration. Of those seven years, only in the last three has the game been in actual development, with Rockstar's Toronto team at the helm. Indeed, this will be the first game release under the Rockstar Toronto banner, as previously they've only worked on ports and conversions. We didn't need long with the game to see how polished and stylistic it was, having that level of quality and brutal gameplay Rockstar titles are notorious for.

With The Warriors, they are hoping to become one of the minority of developers that manage to not only create a game that respects and honours the licence it bears, but is also a decent game in its own right. Not stopping there though, they're also trying to reinvigorate a genre that hasn't yet made a successful foray into 3D. What they've ended up with is, at least at its core, a scrolling beat 'em up (Rockstar call it a 'brawler'), with a fighting engine that immediately feels very visceral; the attacks bear a sense of weight, and are backed up with some meaty sound effects, and a visually dynamic (and oddly amusing) array of blood and bruising shows up on your Warriors' faces and bodies, as they take damage.

The combat system is one of complexity through simplicity, only invoking three buttons (light and heavy attacks, and a grab), in an effort to stomp out button mashing. Even from these simple beginnings though, a large variety of attacks can be performed. Each of the nine gang members has their own style of fighting, reversals, throws and signature 'Power' moves; there are also context sensitive moves, say whilst running, or near a wall; 'Snap' attacks if you get surrounded; 'Rage' mode (when you've taken, or dished out, so much damage), and 'Tandem' moves where two characters beat on one poor unfortunate soul.

Add weapons to the mix, as you do, and hopefully there should be enough variety in the fighting parts of the game to hold player interest. How balanced and necessary each of the gang members (and their array of moves) are, aside from continuity with the film, will only be evident in the final code.

From the structure of the game, it's plain to see that Rockstar have realised that successful licensed games are those that don't just port across their content verbatim, but rather strip out the essence of the source material, and build a game structure around it. As such, only the final third of the game tracks the events seen in the film, with the majority of the game seeing the everyday life of the Warriors, and their journey toward the fateful night of Cyrus's murder. What this amounts to is more than just a straight fighting game, something that will hopefully break up what is otherwise considered to be an easily repetitive and one-note affair, and an open-ended mission structure should go someway toward avoiding this issue.

Stealth makes an appearance, but instead of a feeling of it just being bolted on, as in far too many other games, it is handled here in the same confident and reliable manner as in Manhunt, and its brief appearance in San Andreas; indeed "It wouldn't be a Rockstar game, if it wasn't that way" says Rockstar. There also seems to be a growing trend of the inclusion of mini-games, such as with God of Wars finishing moves, and all of Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy in the US), and Warriors is no exception.

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