It’s been just about 16 years since the first Fear Effect game was released, back in 2000 on the original Playstation. Notably, it was one of the first games to use cel-shading, giving the Playstation classic a very stylized look, that, while a little dated, still holds up to this day quite nicely. With gameplay that looks to greatly borrow from games such as the classic Biohazard/Resident Evil games.
Published by Square Enix Europe, whom at the time were known as Eidos Interactive, and developed by Kronos Digital Entertainment, Fear Effect, was a moderate success. Garnering a prequel game, called Fear Effect 2: Retro Helix very quickly within the next two years.
A third game was slated for development for the Playstation 2, called Fear Effect Inferno. However, it was canceled early on in between 2002 and 2003, which was then followed by the disbanding of Kronos Entertainment. Hardly anything was heard from the series until its re-releases on the Playstation Network in December of 2014, and February of 2015 respectively.
Just today we were greeted with the news that Square Enix has given their blessing to a small indie dev team called Sushee to bring back the classic series with: Fear Effect Sedna.
While the teaser says a lot, as its style still appears to be very stylized, with Hana and Rain still keeping their bombshell bodies. However, don’t go expecting a true to form continuation of the games of years past. As the founder of Sushee said to Eurogamer: “We are not Kronos. We are an indie team. We want to make something that respects the series, but it’s not going to be Fear Effect 3. It’s going to be a new Fear Effect with new gameplay,” which is not much more than you can expect from an indie team of ten people. Though from what we’ve seen, it looks in good hands.
The new gameplay will be more strategy oriented with you controlling five characters at a time, which previously only switched periodically in the earlier installments with it appearing to very heavily resemble the gameplay of Shadowrun Returns. But with a target price of just a little over $100,000 dollars for the Kickstarter, and a projected PC release in the middle of 2017, and with stretch goals for console, this is looking to be an exciting revival for a dormant IP of Square Enix, and personally I’m hopeful that it won’t be the last.
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