It's that game. You know the one. It's horrible in every way - the graphics look like they would run on a phone from ten years ago but it still halves your framerate, the sound quality constantly fluctuates from muffled studio to on-the-street recording, there are about three animations and none of them look any good, and the soundtrack could be recreated by an amateur orchestra in an earthquake.
And everyone's bought it.
"Oh, that? Um, it's not mine, it's on rental."
"Oh, it was a gift from my auntie. I haven't played it."
"Oh, it's my little brother's, not mine. It's one of his friends' copy."
Then why did it sell so much?
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This "game" is an experiment in marketing, and is more or less designed to be as low quality as possible. From unfinished collision models and physics to bugs affecting the game constantly to terrible controls, everything about the game makes you want to forget about it as soon as possible while being annoying enough that you just can't. It also has really good marketing, the kind Sega employed against Nintendo to make Sonic a success. (Unrelated: WATCH_DOGS) The experiment part is by the company - they've watched trends in the gaming industry and have made it their mission to see how far this can go by making a game so bad people would be repulsed by it, but see if good enough marketing can save it. On estimation, it would be a modern military shooter set in a world of blocks, with crafting systems, a killstreak functionality, online DLC, DRM, survival elements, paid content, boring items, unfinished content, an "open beta" status, a "Z" at the end of the name, retro "indie fresh" pixel graphics, and everything else that's popular these days but done in a way that is so bad not even the rule of "so bad it's good" can save it from its monotony. There are posters for it everywhere though, and it does have really nice press...
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Image: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwJ9BN8CWRs
You woke up sometime between morning and noon. The bare walls around you lacking a clock, you're not sure when. You blink, sigh, get up as you normally do, picking yourself off the bedroll laid in the corner of the empty room and reach for the familiar comforting grip of your rifle. Then you feel it.
This morning is different. You woke up not to birdsong, but to gunfire.
Looking out of the second floor window of the hollow concrete structure you live in, you see something you hoped you wouldn't: fighting. The area you live in is a contested one, inhabited by three major gangs. You belong to one, which is why you sleep in a bunker and not a casket. Beyond that, the other two gangs are hostile - kill on sight is the order of the day. It seems that while you were sleeping, guerrilla warfare broke out and the streets are now permeated by the sporadic sounds of clips being emptied.
Turning away from the window, you set about grabbing what you need - a weapon and your gang colours. You're having a hard time waking up, most likely still recovering from some serious head trauma you sustained during the last skirmish. Since then, everything's been more or less black and white. You're almost completely colourblind.
It's going to be hard to tell who to shoot from now on.
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World is Grey is a first person shooter where you play as a gang member in a concrete warzone who sees the world in 85% black and white. Your base is no longer safe, and you must move quickly through the streets if you want to survive. Around corners will be members of the three gangs, two of which will try to kill you on sight and the other which will not shoot you if they can help it but can be startled by you nonetheless. You have a rifle and plenty of ammo, but the problem is in whether and who to shoot. If you shoot before checking to see if it's an enemy, you may end up killing an ally and causing bigger problems for yourself and your gang down the line. But if you spend too much time trying to figure out whether they're going to shoot, you may also quickly figure out bullets hurt.
Every time you get a kill, a surge of adrenaline will flush through you and colour will briefly return, fading back to normal after a couple of seconds. If you chain kills together rapidly, the adrenaline adds up, allowing you to see in colour for longer and have more time to pick out your next target. It also allows you to see if the target you just killed was hostile or not. Oops...
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Picture is an edit of Homefront: The Revolution by Crytek and Deep Silver, to be released in 2016.
