So, some friends of mine tried “Fragpunk” last night and dragged me into trying it. Short version - don’t bother, I didn’t last 2 hours. It’s insanely jam packed with currencies and predatory micro-transactions, the most boring character designs I’ve ever seen in the genre, AI Slop art, insanely ugly weapon models, and it’s published by NetEase. That’s like a hundred red flags for what is, at best, a competent 5v5 hero shooter.
But one of the ways they talked me into at least giving it a shot was one friend was convinced (by AI lying to him) that Bad Guitar Studios was Canadian. Upon scrutiny that wasn’t even a little true but it DID get me thinking, are we making any cool games up here in the North?
I found some stuff with basic Googling. Compulsion games just released South of Midnight and that looks pretty good, though it’s owned by Microsoft. Pheonix Labs made Dauntless, I didn’t know they were Canadian. There’s a bunch of tiny mobile developers. But I thought maybe other people might have more insight. Does anybody have an awesome game made by Canadians that they can point me towards?
Nobody has mentioned Blue Isle Studios yet. I played Valley, which is a single player, story/mystery driven game played in a wilderness setting with some cool movement mechanics. I can certainly recommend it if that sounds interesting to you. Their newer games are horror (slender man) or multiplayer pvp games that don’t get great reviews and aren’t my jam so I haven’t tried them but Valley was great.