Sunday's Xbox Games Showcase was pretty stacked, but one game stood out from the crowd with a five-and-a-half minute preview: Clockwork Revolution, the steampunk RPG shooter from the studio behind Wasteland 3 and Torment: Tides of Numenera.
It's got all the brash humor I've come to expect from inXile in the most ambitious-looking game it's done yet. Whether the team hits the mark, I'm not sure I care right now: the ideas they're working with are so bold, they have my full attention.
On the surface, Clockwork Revolution looks like an RPG-ified, steampunk take on BioShock. Combat is all elaborate brass guns, grenades that shoot out bolts of electricity, and a magic glove that comes with all sorts of time-warping powers. They give some examples in the trailer: bullet time, a personal rewind a la Overwatch's Tracer, and the power to rebuild a crumbled stack of bricks in the environment for use as cover. The gunplay implications are well and good, but the time travel also saw narrative play in ways that left me dying to know more.
There's a quick flyby of a spot in Avalon that repeats a few times, but the scene is different with each replay. Different banners fly, statues of different people tower over a town square, and the narrator remarks he can "go back in time to change the past, to change the future."
It's possible these are canned set pieces along a linear path, but inXile promises that "choices will have a butterfly effect" on the world and its characters. Mixing an open-ended choice-and-consequence RPG with time travel seems almost irresponsibly daring, but what galls me is the trailer had even more to say. It was a full five-and-a-half minutes, after all.
There's a glimpse at character creation, kitted out with as many different stats and character backgrounds as suitably huge mustaches. We also get a look at a weapon modding interface, a glut of glossy story cutscenes, dialog trees, and newspaper headlines that shift with the changing story.
The shootouts I mentioned earlier looked to be no slouch either, and there were some brief platforming segments where the time-bending was used to slow down hazards. I shouldn't be surprised that inXile is taking a big swing—Wasteland 3 is one of the slicker CRPGs in recent memory—but the extent to which Clockwork Revolution aims for the fences has me pretty tantalized. I'm a little worried it's trying to do too much, but I'd rather a game be messy and exciting than dull and safe.
If Clockwork Revolution piques your interest, it's available to wishlist on Steam, though its current release window is "in due time."
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