City of Brass
Become a daring thief in City of Brass, a first-person action adventure from senior BioShock developers. Armed with scimitar and a versatile whip, you’ll lash and slash, bait and trap your way to the heart of an opulent, Arabian Nights-themed metropolis – or face certain death as time runs out. Players will have to leap across pits, slide under blades, avoid spears or arrows, evade or employ sprung paving slabs, and skirt round poison gas traps – all the while manipulating these dangers to their advantage against enemies. Incarcerated within the city are genies, most of them friendly, who will barter benefits in return for loot or grant wishes for a powerful advantage.
The rhythmic interplay between sword and whip is carefully tuned along with sprinting, crouching, sliding, leaping and vaulting to give a fluid, balanced and natural feel to the movement and melee. Eternal replayability is granted by a design that encourages combinative gameplay within an ever-changing but logical procedurally generated world. Players will die in the City of Brass – often, and quite horribly – but they will always want to come back for just one more try…
City of Brass Review
A competently designed and aesthetically pleasing first person rogue-lite. Probably the most direct comparison in terms of gameplay style and structure would be to Spelunky (albiet with some persistent progression, character classes, and, well, a 3D dimension of space). It’s primarily melee-oriented and the levels are randomized, divided into a few different areas/tilesets and filled with deadly traps.
Each character class has a weapon in their main hand and a whip in their off-hand. The whip is the focus of the core gameplay loop, providing utility in almost every situation. You can use it to disarm, trip and stun enemies, swing from hanging rings to get around the level quickly, trigger traps (instead of triggering them with your face), grab items and treasure from a distance.
Unfortunately, as is pretty much inevitable with this kind of game, the levels have the distinct feeling of modularity. It’s clear that they are a collection of generic parts designed to fit together in a variety of configurations. As a result, levels are never particularly impressive and they get repetitive after a while. I was also hoping for more system-oriented “immersive sim” type elements, given that they self-advertise as “senior BioShock developers,” but there isn’t really much of that (aside from perhaps the diverse utility of the whip).
The developers have also been busy since launch, tightening up the game, adding new items, new characters, and other improvements that add variety that the game arguably missed at launch. The latest patch added a fully ranged character, which is more my style (and extremely good). The game also runs quite well, consistently hitting ~150fps in low intensity areas on Ultra and around twice that (250-300) on low settings (with resolution scale at 100%). The mouse aim has felt a bit off since launch (feels like input lag). I suspect that it has been improved, but it’s been too long since I first played it to make the direct comparison.
Overall, it’s an enjoyable and well-made game.
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