The Kickstarter project aims to bring back the glory days of arena shooters – Quake, Unreal Tournament, the likes

Sep 30, 2014 14:41 GMT  ·  By

A brand new video from a studio currently undergoing a crowdfunding campaign for its upcoming game does a pretty good job of showcasing some of the exciting features of movement in a first-person shooter.

Shooters have been moving away from old-school arena shooters and more toward realistic military simulation for years now, with Call of Duty and Battlefield being the perfect marriage of realism and arcade action.

However, there are still those who remember the days when you could get out of lava with a well-placed rocket jump, which entailed shooting your RPG into the ground and using the explosion as extra momentum for your jump.

Some of those players who favored the vanilla arcade action of Quake, Half-Life and Unreal Tournament are now making a new game titled Reflex, currently trying to raise money on Kickstarter.

Back in the day, practice made perfect, and skill played a very big role in being successful in multiplayer clashes. In addition to aiming, you also had to navigate the map, looking for better weapons and armor, and most of the time employing various shortcuts proved to be the difference between winning and losing.

Those shortcuts, however, often mean practicing for hours until getting the basic mechanics of corner jumps and bunny-hopping right, in order for them to become second nature, and learning the layout of levels to the point where you could navigate them with your eyes closed.

The honored past might become the glorious future

Developer Turbo Pixel intends to revive some of that classic action, when the ability to bounce off the map and jump off of explosions was considered of paramount importance. Back then, you didn't just spawn with your loadout, and you didn't have to aim through crosshairs. You couldn't camp either.

Reflex is a modern arena shooter that includes all manner of tricks and skill-testing jumps that enable players not only to move around the arena with top speed and efficiency, but also to look good while doing it.

The Kickstarter pitch also mentions an in-game map editor that enables players to create their own custom arenas, in an attempt to enable users to take advantage of the impressive movement methods in a more creative way, and lists the target framerate to be 120 frames per second, which means that we'll see some really fast-paced action where reflexes and practice will make gamers shine.

Even its logo is a bit of an homage to Quake's iconic one. The team states that Reflex stems from their desire to improve upon existing arena shooters and to bring the genre into the spotlight once again, in a modern incarnation.