Metrocide is a stealthy, cyberpunk Grand Theft Auto starring a contract killer

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It's a shame the preferred view for city-set action games is now an over-the-shoulder one, as there's something enjoyably Police, Camera, Action!y to viewing a metropolitan crime spree from a bird's eye view. It's also, I'd imagine, a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to implement. Metrocide is the rare city-set game employing a Cpt. Birds Eye perspective to tell its story of a freelance assassin doing his murdery job in a cyberpunk dystopia. It's a bit like Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2 (only seemingly without a fully open world). It's a bit like Syndicate, for obvious cyber-reasons. It's also a bit like Hitman, what with you being a hitman and everything. See how these various influences coalesce after the break.

Here's a quote from the site explaining what that video was all about. I've bolded the relevant part.

"You play as legendary contract killer T. J. Trench , taking out the trash one target at a time. Play through the three zones of retro-futuristic and cyberpunk-inspired MetroCity earning cash for completing kills in this brutal stealth-action game inspired by such classics as Syndicate and Grand Theft Auto." Developers Flat Earth Games go on to use the meaningless buzz term "living city" to describe the game, but I'll forgive them on account of the neat camera-follows-bullet thing at the cyber-end of their cyber-video. It's not listed as an influence, but I'm detecting a hint of Hotline Miami about this too.

Metrocide is coming later this year, and Amiga users will be disappointed to hear it will be "too large to fit on a single double-density 3.5" floppy disk". Booooooo.

Tom Sykes
Tom Sykes

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.