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RIOT – Civil Unrest, a game in which you play on sides of street riots (cops and rioters) across will be out on Steam this summer.
It recreates actual protests from around the world including the Indignados in Spain, Arab Spring in Egypt, Keratea in Greece, and NoTAV in Italy. Leonard Menchiari, the game’s creator, took part in the latter of those, the NoTAV protests. After experiencing it, he wanted to explore the emotions that fuel protests and rioting in a videogame. As such, RIOT explores questions such as: “What triggers the crowd to behave with such anger and aggression? Often outnumbered, what does a police officer feel like during the conflict?”
Playing on the police side, you can be both passive and aggressive with your crowd control tactics. You can call in police trucks, water cannons, and snatch squads. You can go in with rubber bullets, tasers, live ammunition. On the rioters side you instruct leaders rioters, journalists, and agitators looking to either incite rage or calm people down with tactical crowd reformation. As a rioter, you also have molotov cocktails, street furniture, rocks, and the power of the media at your disposal.
The game contains 20 levels that can be played from both perspectives. It also has three different game modes including a single player mode, a skirmish mode that lets you play against a friend on the same computer, and a multiplayer mode so you can can play against a friend online. There’s also a level editor that lets you create your own riot settings, including background graphics, vehicles and obstacles, time of day and weather, and the starting points of rioters and police, as well as their aggression levels.
