My starting point for thinking about a Captain America video game was a bad one: That guy's pretty boring, right? He's a strong man who punches, kicks and uses a shield. How do you make a special game from that?
After seeing the game's screenshots and trailer, I watched its lead designer play through a few sections of the game. I get it now. Cap can be a good gaming hero, because he can sort of be Batman.
Captain America: Super Soldier has an architectural resemblance to the splendid 2009 Batman: Arkham Asylum. Both games confined their hero to a relatively small bit of geography, Arkham Island for Batman and a World War II Hydra castle complex for Captain America. Both games feature a hero who must learn the corners of his place. Recalling an older great cited by Super Soldier's designer, they, like Metroid, require and reward backtracking to previously locked quarters.
Super Soldier's Captain America, like Arkham's Batman is a man of quick reflexes and mastery of one-vs-many combat. In the demo of Super Soldier I was shown, America's top fighting man could battle a crowd with a rhythmic succession of inputs from the player. Captain America's fighting moves are context-sensitive, pounding and contorting his Nazi-esque enemies in different ways depending on how they stand or fall. Captain America posesses a "focus meter" that is filled as the player plays well. The focus meter can be spent to execute super moves. The hero can be brutal with his fists.
…
Captain America has "tactical vision" in his new game, a still-in-development feature that the creators of the game say will both highlight what to do next and provide clues about the surroundings. For now, it looks like the Detective Vision mode in Arkham.
What Captain America has over Batman is that his patriotic shield may be better than a Batarang. It can be tossed as a boomeranging weapon, but it can also block gunfire.
Click to expand...