Preview: It's Complete Mayhem In Obscure

Monsters, zombies and high school kids… sounds cliché right? Well not in Focus Home Interactive’s upcoming title Obscure! You may recognise the title and you should as the game is inspired by Ubisoft’s 2004 release however a completely different spin has been put on it, to help it stand out.

Obscure is a 2.5D side scroller in which you control one of four characters between a crew of high school students who end up tearing through hordes of creatures in order to reach the party of their young lives. These characters are some of the standard ones you’ll come across, each with their own unique abilities and moves which are developed as you progress through the game. Honestly what makes titles like these so much fun to play is the combat and basically bowling through tons of enemies, luckily for me that’s exactly what I did in the demo. The mechanic itself allows you to attack multiple foes at one time with the option to combo them to death giving you a higher score multiplier. You’re also given the choice to use weapons and have the ability to perform super moves which cause devastating damage.


During levels, you are given objectives to complete and these can range from protecting a VIP to collecting parts to build machines. Funnily enough I was able to build one of these machines in the demo which turned out to be a tank/ship hybrid, kitted out with some crazy weapons such as flames shooting out from the bottom of it, a machine gun on the right and a grenade launcher on the left. It was easy to control and it became a great use when being attacked by enemies who take more than a few bullets to be taken down. The levels themselves are pretty vibrant and range from your usual horror locations such as a haunted mansion, abandoned funfair etc. But don’t let this get you down as I have a feeling that the environment will somehow come into play as well.

Please form an orderly line to your death.

While it wasn't possible to go into at the time, one thing that was mentioned during the presentation was the ability to do Co-Op local or online with up to three other people. It made complete sense as the tank/ship hybrid I mentioned before looked like it was made to be controlled by more than one person and another good thing being that, there will be no need for split screen as the level design more than makes up for that allowing all four characters to be seen at the same time.

Obscure is a fun, crazy title that takes chaos the next level. It’s shaping up to be quite an enjoyable title and while I can’t give two thumbs up until I see the full game, What I've seen of it so far definitely gives me high hopes for it and it’ll be interesting to see how the Co-Op runs. Team Betrayals anyone? Obscure is set to be released during 2013 for the Xbox 360, Windows PC and PlayStation 3 as a digital download and for more information, check out Focus Home Interactive’s page here - http://www.focus-home.com/index.php?rub=news&id=482