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Gunkatana started out as a project meant to investigate what made Hotline Miami tick. It’s now its own robust, fast-paced local multiplayer cyberpunk game.
Played from a top-down view, every player in Gunkatana is given the titular weapon with which to kill each other. Being a katana that works like a gun, you can fire lasers from it but also deflect enemy laser fire by swinging it at the right time.
But this weapon isn’t actually what gives Gunkatana its personality. That belongs to its turbo-fast grind rails. “The speed rails started off as quick way to implement the Matrix‘s wall running,” writes designer Geraldo Nascimento. “I wanted to create a game with that sense of speed and action, letting you speed along the walls, Mirror’s Edge like.”
What he ended up with is a new type of environmental weapon. Players are able to jump on the rails scattered around the maps at any point to fly along them at high speed. If you run into other players while on a grind rail you’ll instantly kill them. But they’re mostly used as a way to evade conflicts or to throw yourself into one in an instant.
Gunkatana is coming to PC in 2016. You can find out more about it on its website as well as this article about its development.
