Lund states that the team is going for a cross between the board game and Firaxis’ XCOM: Enemy Unknown title.
”As you play the game and move around, and see your tactical squad, we have an action camera that goes down into the corridor and shows the action up close. Or if you’re in Overwatch and a Genestealer’s going down a corridor, the camera will sometimes switch down and into an over-the-shoulder shot with the Terminator firing an Assault Cannon. You see the Genestealer in real-time moving up and then suddenly it hits and splats,” Lund described, ”So, that kind of vision is what we aim for on an overall level. And trying to make it as cinematic and creepy and claustrophobic as possible.”
He added, ”The game itself will play a lot like the boardgame but we do some optimisations to make the game more fluid, a little bit more action-ish. Some of the things that we’ve been doing are you can click on a tile past a closed door and the door will automatically open, so you get a little bit more fluid gameplay instead of going to the door, standing in front of it, opening it and then you can click onwards. Getting a little bit faster gameplay out of it will still keeping the core, essential boardgame, turn-based feeling.”
The game won’t be as action oriented as the old MS-DOS Space Hulk, according to Lund. ”We don’t want to try to reproduce what EA did in the old days. They essentially took a turn-based game and made it into a more action, real-time thing. We’re taking the boardgame and making a turn-based game with some action elements. I’d much more compare it to XCOM than I would the old EA games.”
As for co-op, ”We’re going to do it so you play two squads and each player controls a set of them. So I come in with my five guys, and you could come in with your five guys, and while it’s our turn we each do our own turns and play against the AI,” he explained.
He went on to note that the iPad version of the game will be as close to the PC version as possible, but the game is PC first, and will be ported to other platforms.