The Adversary Hands-On

Namco is a well-known Japanese game developer, but a lesser-known fact is that the company has some of its development studios headquartered in California. Games like Dead to Rights and kill.switch were made in the USA, and the upcoming shooter The Adversary, which was announced just prior to E3, will be the next game that the developers of kill.switch apply themselves to. You may recall that kill.switch was a shooter that heavily relied on one-man-army-style gameplay in which players needed to ward off multiple opponents by firing from behind cover. The Adversary bears some superficial similarity to that game, but unlike that game, it'll feature a multiplayer mode in addition to a single-player campaign. Namco had an early build of the multiplayer action on display at E3, so of course we decided to give it a go.

But first, let's go over some of the game's basic features, since Namco has been mum about them so far. The bullet points cited at E3 bill The Adversary as having a nonlinear, open-ended campaign; 16-player online multiplayer support; the ability to use weapons, vehicles, stealth, melee attacks, and various high-tech devices; and realistic physics thanks to the ever-popular Havok physics engine. The game will also reportedly let you play as a soldier, a spy, a hitman, or a custom character class, and we assume that these different roles roughly correspond to different character classes in a shooter.

We spoke to one of the programmers on the project, who mentioned that in the game, basically you'll be playing as the bad guy--like one of the goons in a Die Hard movie, for instance. You'll be able to do such things as steal cars and murder people and other such criminal acts. The game borrows some of kill.switch's mechanics, such as the ability to hide behind cover and fire "blind" from behind it, slug people with the butt of a rifle, dive for cover, and use flashbang grenades to blind opponents.

We did get to try the basic combat mechanics out in a multiplayer environment, but we were informed that the game is currently only 5 percent complete. Indeed, what we played basically felt like a kill.switch multiplayer mode, though some of the shooting mechanics still felt a little rough.

The Adversary seems like a cool concept, and the team behind kill.switch obviously has talent, judging from its last game's finer points. However, the build of the game that's on the E3 show floor doesn't do much to stand out from the crowd (especially with games like Ace Combat 5 right nearby). The game's release date is still to be announced, though, so hopefully The Adversary will get plenty of time in the oven. We'll be bringing you more information on the game as it becomes available.