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The beat’em-up genre is one of my favorites, but I certainly recognize the limitations of the game type. It’s not the most varied genre out there, but a handful of developers have made it their mission to innovate within those confines. Tribute Games is one of those teams, and they’re looking to show off some new ideas for beat’em-ups with TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge.

In an interview with Eurogamer, Tribute Games co-founder Jonathan Lavigne opened up about the structure of beat’em-ups, and how they’re looking to breath some fresh air into the genre with TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge. You can see his full comments on the matter below.

“I think [the genre] has a reputation of being very repetitive. It’s a fair reputation, honestly, because it’s a challenge to make a beat ‘em-up that doesn’t feel repetitive. Given the nature of these games you don’t have options to do unique stuff with platforming and stuff like that - it’s often just mashing the same button and the enemies don’t have really distinct patterns. That’s an issue with a lot of beat ‘em-ups. That’s something that you have to alleviate, and find different ways to make it fun. It’s a huge challenge to make a beat ‘em-up that doesn’t feel repetitive and keeps being entertaining all the way through.

What we did was to make the rhythm almost like a shoot ‘em-up. Enemies enter in certain formations and with certain timings that will create a certain rhythm. And you know, when you get into that beat you can and you make the player anticipate where to travel on screen. And also the pacing is really fast - enemies will enter then be defeated in a few hits, and then new enemies enter. I think that keeps the game from being repetitive because you keep the player active.”

[Jonathan Lavigne]

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Comments (1)

mereel

2y ago

The hype for this one is real. Everything I’ve seen about the game so far sounds spot-on. Can’t wait.