"It's not meant to be a hoodlum game," says the developer at new studio Cleverbeans who recently showed me his game about mobs who can attack each other by running through city streets and hurling whichever benches, signs or cars are available as projectile weapons.
Oh, it's not at all a hoodlum game if you look at it-certainly not any sort of London riot simulator like it might seem from a simple text description. It's actually too cute for that and closer to Nintendo's Pikmin. In the game, which will be available on PlayStation 3 and Vita this October, each gamer controls a hopefully-growing pack of people who dash around and can pick up anything they have enough collective strength to pick up. Then, as noted, they throw it… at the other players or at the bad guys-those dastardly Vikings!—running around. The flow is more arcade than Pikmin's real-time strategy, more back-and-forth chaos than careful-planning.
Look at it once and you might skip the game for being nothing extraordinary. Play it once, as I did at a recent Sony showcase, and you'll find yourself playing many more times. It's a good surprise and one that utilizes one of PlayStation's neater tricks: not only can you play it on Vita or PS3, but Vita players can cross-play with or against PS3 players. I did that at the Sony showcase, me and two others on one PS3 and a fourth player on the Vita. You would have thought we were playing a Wii U!