If it quacks like a Pysduck. Undead Labs of State of Decay fame has just announced a new game headed for mobile devices next year. Ominously just called Moonrise, the game’s goals and basic elements sounds awfully close to that monster collecting and training Nntendo game that everyone either loves or loves to hate.
Not that having similarities to Pokémon is necessarily a bad thing, nor that Pokémon has a monopoly on the monster-human partnership concept. You could probably throw in a bit of Monster Rancher into the mix. As well as Digimon, minus the completely digital alternate world. A rose by any other name. Moonrise takes that familiar and well-loved (or well-hated) pet-raising pet-fighting genre and turns it into something you can play on your Android device. And hopefully it will a lot better than those Farmville-like Pokémon-inspired games that have saturated Google Play Store with their purposely addicting but ultimately shallow content.
For one, this game has a backstory, thin as it may be. The word “Moonrise” actually refers to a random and once rare lunar phenomenon that transformed otherwise peaceful critters called Solari into their more violent Lunari forms. Your job as an aspiring Master Warden is to catch ’em all. Er, what we mean is to purify these poor creatures back into their Solari selves and then recruit them to your team to fight off (and purify and “recruit”, of course) other Lunari. Oh, and you get to fight other wannabe Wardens (real human players), too. Of course, you also have skills to develop, though if our guess is correct, you’ll have a limit to the number of “active” skills you can carry around.
Undead Labs isn’t yet revealing many of the aspects that could make or break this game. How will the controls be like? Will battles take place real-time or in Dragon City-like “leave a message after the beep” in absentia fights? And most important of all, will there be in-game purchases for pay-to-win players? At least these veteran game designers aren’t going for a retro look and will be going with 3D assets, so we can expect something different from this game. Moonrise is set to go into beta this fall, whether that is private or public is unknown. Should things work out as planned, it will launch sometime in early 2015.
SOURCE: Moonrise
VIA: Android Central
