A new announcement trailer was just quietly unveiled with heavy metal and epic guitar riffs accompanying a player fragging through roguelike dungeons. I’m already hooked and I’ve experienced a whopping minute of the entirety of the gameplay, but it’s bringing rather distinct genres together allowing players to experience harmony as they murder demons through gruesome dungeons.
The game is called BPM: Bullets Per Minute, and it’s a strange mashup of hardcore first-person shooting mixed with rhythm mechanics. Reload in tune to heavy-metal music wailing in your ears, fire a wide arsenal of weaponry at various enemies matching the heavy beat, and explore randomly-generated dungeons as one of many selectable Valkyries to play as.
I don’t know how anyone can watch the trailer and not immediately foam at the mouth. It’s like DOOM met Crypt of the Necrodancer and had the most beautiful baby imaginable.
Coming from Awe Interactive in their first foray into game development as a studio, BPM already has a Steam page set up with a release date target of August 2020. In the trailer Awe Interactive states that the title will be coming to PC this summer, and consoles in the winter of 2020, meaning everyone will ultimately explore the glory of rhythmic fragging regardless of what platform they prefer to use.
Heres our steam page. Please wishlist the game for future updates! https://t.co/QBsznXnjq6
— BPM (@bpmgame) April 30, 2020
The ability to select various Valkyries to stomp through dungeons implies that different characters will have different abilities to use during their exploration that will likely synergize with the various weapons available to use. The Steam page for BPM states that the game will release with five different characters that all have their own unique strengths and weaknesses, matched with a diverse array of grotesque enemies that all play with the beat in unique ways.
In addition to the weapons, enemies, and Valkyries all mixing up the playthroughs, users will also stumble upon unique items in their playthroughs that can grant unique buffs and abilities to players to help tilt the odds in their favor. Finally, there will be challenge modes that offer the best fraggers a chance to earn some bragging rights, further continuing the longevity of the title.
As anyone who is familiar with roguelikes knows, they are best experienced when there is a wide variety of finely-tuned content to come across in each run, and that will likely decide the ultimate fate of BPM. While the trailer is difficult not to drool over, it does bring with it questions about how weaponry will feel to fire in tune to a beat, or whether the exploration of a 3D roguelike dungeon will offer enough content to merit hundreds, if not thousands, of runs. For the time being, it’s more than enough to simply fawn over the rock opera music while it shows agile fragging.
