RICO reminds me of F.E.A.R., the solid horror shooter from Monolith Productions, but without the scary bits. It's a co-op cop shooter in which you and a partner blast through procedurally-generated levels, slipping in and out of slow motion as you bust down doors and shotgun bad guys from three feet away, sending them flying across the room.
It's those slow-mo sections that put me in mind of Monolith's FPS, along with the air-warping bullet trails. You'll be able to play in split-screen or online co-op when it launches this autumn (it doesn't have a specific release date yet). The idea is that the game evolves as you get better: as you play you'll unlock new enemies, weapons, abilities, and mission types that will then pop up in subsequent runs.
Each run will be framed around an individual case containing multiple missions. You'll have 24 hours to solve that case before you move onto the next one. Variety will be the key, and developer Ground Shatter needs to pack enough cases and mission types into the game to stop the formula becoming stale.
The trailer looks like a lot of fun, but there are—unless my eyes are deceiving me—one or two frame rate hitches that will need to be ironed out. Plus the enemy AI looks forgiving to say the least, but perhaps that's just for the purposes of the trailer. Bursting into a room and picking off masses of goons in slow motion is just plain fun, and the game supports that fantasy by throwing in plenty of destructible objects. For that alone, I think it's worth keeping tabs on.
The game has been knocking about for a while, but the video has been released to mark it finding a publisher, Rising Star Games. You can find out more about RICO on its website.
