Ubisoft's I Am Alive Gets Cut Off at the Knees

I Am Alive is one of Ubisoft's upcoming games, a new IP with an interesting concept and even more interesting gameplay mechanics. A Jade Raymond project, at first developed by Darkwoods, and now in the hands of Ubisoft Shanghai, it was first revealed at E3 2008, and received a spring 2009 release date that it obviously didn't meet. Later pegged as coming in 2010, it looks like this won't happen either, as the game just got melted down back to spare parts and rebuild from the ground up.

Apparently, the main reason for this delay is the change in game engines, and, considering to what the change has been made, we can understand the delays and probably expect even more in the coming future. According to Ubisoft's CEO, Yves Guillemot, the title will make use of Splinter Cell's visuals and will come out sometime in 2011.

"We have totally re-engineered I Am Alive. It's still on the way, it's going to use the Splinter Cell engine," he said. "We have amortized all the costs that were incurred with the previous developer. Everything we do is fresh now on that product and we think it can be very good quality, but it's not going to come this financial year." Announced as coming on the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the action survival horror hinted at first-person gameplay and showed off some pretty amazing gameplay mechanics.

One of the more interesting ones was keeping enemies at bay with an unloaded gun, threatening and scaring people by simply pointing it while making sure their "no ammo" secret was kept safe. Hopefully, this feature and the general gameplay direction will survive the game's restart. Taking place in Chicago after a catastrophic earthquake, the city is left in a chaotic, post-apocalyptic setting, with the most common of commodities, water, becoming something one would give their life to obtain.