Biff! Smash! Spear to the groin! Asteroid to the jaw! It must be a new gameplay video for Tides Of Annihilation, the Arthurian fantasy action game from Eclipse Glow Games that’s out to steal either Stellar Blade, Final Fantasy XVI or Bayonetta’s lunch – do me a favour and pick one, because I can’t decide. I can’t stop comparing this game to things. I think there’s something wrong with me. Help.
The hoity-toity Englishness of it all is somewhat Bayonetta (minus the humour), but the ally-summoning mechanics remind me more of FF16, while lead character Gwendolyn is from the same school of improbably clean-cut beauty as Stellar Blade’s Eve. She’s perhaps a bit more grizzled than Eve, possibly because she keeps letting witches hit her in the face with small planets.
Watch on YouTube
The video shows us a boss battle against one of those witches, Tyronoe. It appears unedited, so we can get a sense of the ebb and flow of the game’s fancier throwdowns. The boss alternates between human-scale punching, valkyrie bombardments from the other side of energy barriers, and a tricksy little moment where she warps through a frozen lake’s mirrored surface and starts battering you from inside the reflection. Fortunately, Gwendolyn teams up mid-fight with a Knight of the Roundtable, Lamorak, whose twisty javelin proves super-effective against the hag.
A barrage of background trivia from the announcement post: based in China, Eclipse Glow number 100 developers and have people who’ve previously worked on Yakuza, For Honor, Assassin’s Creed, Persona, and Prince of Persia.
Tides Of Annihilation will be 30 hours long, and will have around 30 bosses. Some of the enemies are big enough to be levels, a la Fumito Ueda. Yes, that is Jennifer English of Baldur’s Gate 3 fame voicing Gwendolyn. The game is set across post-apocalyptic London and mythical Avalon, and they may have got the bus routes wrong.
