Nekki took advantage of gamescom to return to show SPINE, his cinematic action game built around Gun Fu, the adrenaline-pumping mix of shooting and melee created by the John Wick series, with an unreleased gameplay footage and above all revealing a new release period: summer 2027.

For those who missed the previous announcements, SPINE is a single player experience that mixes close-quarters shooting and Gun Fu-style melee combat. We will play the role of Redline, a street artist with a rebellious spirit equipped with Spine, a sentient combat system with its own will, and together we will have to make our way in a cyberpunk metropolis ruled by an autocratic regime run by an artificial intelligence.

The new footage gives us the first look at Judge, the supreme leader of Tensor City, and the so-called Children of Tensor, namely Edda Kopp and Malady, who are also equipped with their own Thorns system. Ample space is then dedicated to the combat system, with directional attacks, parries, dodges and environmental attacks, as well as some of the bosses we will have to face. Finally, there are several glimpses of the settings, ranging from the intricate underground laboratories to the imposing cliffs of the city's Greenhouse, passing through a clash on the roof of a high-speed train.

Tensor City is a technocratic megalopolis built by artificial intelligence to allow humanity to survive the ecological collapse of the outside world, and inside it the value of a person is reduced to a number: it is the Social Rating that establishes who eats, who works and who is simply discarded, dividing the agglomeration between the glittering New City on the surface and the rotting Old City below. Redline struggles to get by in the slums until a coup organized by the mafia goes wrong, costing her everything she had, including her brother: hence her search to free him and, at the same time, her open challenge to the regime.

On the technical front, the game relies on Unreal Engine 5 and Nekki's proprietary animation engine, Cascadeur, while the directing work and the choreography of the clashes were taken care of by stunt specialists from action cinema. The declared goal is to make us feel like the protagonists of a film: the dynamic camera accompanies each fight with a cinematic cut, but without ever taking control away from us, and the fusion between spectacular gunplay and Freeflow system ensures that no clash really resembles the previous one, leaving us the freedom to build our own personal style of destruction. To frame there is an atmosphere played entirely on the contrast between the utopian and glossy facades of the city and the decaying alleys that are below it, with each location transformed into a stage for high-adrenaline shootings. The narrative component also promises specific weight, given that every clash sustained by Redline affects the roads we move on, changing the lives of the people we meet.

We leave you now to the new trailer, enjoy!