Antihero was the first game that Will and I played at EGX Rezzed. And what a game to start with. Initially the first thing that I took notice of was how the game looked visually from the banner over it’s area. I was reminded by survival game Don’t Starve. But this is not a survival game at all, far from it. Antihero is a multiplayer turn based strategy game in which you play as a master thief.
Your objective is simple, you need to ensure that your thieves guild is the more prominent guild in the city. You need to manage the guild by recruiting more members, hiring gangs, stealing as much as you can, bribe and blackmail people and assassinate people too. All the while doing this your opponent will be working on their guild trying to ensure that their thieves guild is the primary one running in the city.
What I enjoyed about this game from the demo we played was the apparent depth that the game has and will no doubt attain more of when fully complete. There were a lot of unlockable perks and guild members to hire and put out on the streets. Urchins are hired to take command of places, the more you put in a building, from our play a church, the more lanterns you unlock at the end of your round. You can hire gangs to beat up guards and protect areas, you can increase the gang’s power and size by hiring more thugs and placing them in the gang. There is also a real sense of urgency with the moves you make in this game, If you have a game plan set for your round you’d better hope you can rob from the house you want, or assassinate the target you wish in you allotted goes as you won’t know what your rival is up to and he might be thinking the same as you. The way to win is to complete or attain 3 milestones, or at least it was for the game we played. The milestones were gained by assassinating targets for one, earning x number of lanterns or having x number of urchins in a building. So there were various ways to get the victory.
From the demo we played we didn’t get to see or use the full list of usable guild members, but from what we could use I had a blast with the game. Currently Antihero is available to purchase as first access. In it’s current state you’ll only have access to multiplayer side of the game with 3 levels to start with but more promised. Local offline is also included as well as a brief single player tutorial. A single player campaign is promised at launch. As it stands the game is aiming for a July 2017 release.
You can keep up to date with the latest developments of Antihero via Versus Evil developer blog which can be found here.
– Murr
