Blue Estate: Nothing more gangster than pretending to shoot guns with your hands

Blue estate. is it like Downton abbey, but everyone’s sad?
Not even slightly, no. Blue Estate is a “darkly funny on-rails shooter about gangsters”, according to the studio’s head of marketing, abrial da costa. even more importantly, it’s fully integrated with Kinect, if you’ve been wanting to dust yours off again. they don’t have Kinects in Downton Abbey.

Ugh, fine. What can i do with the Kinect then?
Loads of stuff one hand controls your gun, and the other does pretty much everything else. “moving your weapon’s crosshair is done by pointing your dominant hand at the screen,”  da costa explains. “shooting is done automatically when the crosshair overlaps with an enemy.”


And my other hand does what now?
Your non-dominant hand is used for environmental interaction kicking in a door, jumping over objects, picking things up and throwing them. these are done with various hand gestures similar to swery’s use of Kinect in D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die, which told you what to do and when to achieve the desired effect.

Is it only “darkly funny” because i’ll be wiggling around trying to kick my way through doors?
well, you do look rather silly. but there’s also a vein of humour in the game one of the characters has hair that keeps falling in front of their eyes, and it’s up to you to fix it via Kinect, by “pretending to run their hand through their hair,” according to da costa.

I probably should have asked this first but what’s the game actually about?
It’s based on a comic book also called Blue Estate, by viktor Kalvachev that came out a couple of years ago. It’s got tones of Sin City, with lots of skimpily dressed women and mountainous men, but the main character roy Jr is a “clueless private eye” who gets accidentally mixed up with some rather shady crime rings. add in a dash of Kinect-wiggling, some arcade-style shooting and a promise of “ridiculous and unpredictable” stories, and you’ve got Blue Estate. It’ll be coming out some time in spring this year, with the team currently working on an extra arcade mode that gives players a time limit and a kill counter. Downton Abbey it ain’t.

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