Brawl while you fall in SkyScrappers, out today on PS4

At its core, SkyScrappers is a competitive platform game, but wrapped in the trappings of a 2D fighter. It draws influence from a wide range of sources, but all with the intention to be a twist in traditional 2D fighting games.

In a bunch of interviews I’ve been asked where I got the idea for SkyScrappers. I’d like to say that it was a wonderful dream, a moment of pure inspiration, or the outcome of 12 hours of painstaking design work. But the truth is that I can’t remember.

I knew that I wanted to make a game that evoked the spirit of classic arcade games, would allow me to work with one of my favourite game artists, and would be a fun and fast-paced multiplayer game. And from those things, SkyScrappers sprung into being; I built a prototype over a few days, shared the idea with the artist, and it grew from there.

Our backgrounds as players have always been with consoles, so it was only natural that we would target the PlayStation 4 as our platform of choice, now a year or so later, the game is available for you to buy from the PlayStation Store.

Someone recently described the game as a perfect “playlist” game, the sort of game that you play when you have a group of friends over and settle for an evening of multiplayer gaming. It’s a game that will nestle perfectly in your library between Towerfall Ascension and Rocket League.

 
But we didn’t want to stop there, as well as the multiplayer mode, each of the game’s four distinctive and diverse character gets their own story that you can play in single player, as you play through their campaign you’ll learn more about each character as well as developing your own skills against increasingly tricky enemy opponents or set up a quick skirmish game however you like and fill it with AI-controlled bots.

Because of SkyScrappers’ arcade influences it retains a certain purity, the controls are one stick and two buttons (jump and attack), but from those simple controls come a huge range of possible tactics, it’s exciting to see just how differently the game plays when playing with two players from how it does playing with four.

Watching and playing against people at shows has let me see tactics that even I hadn’t thought of so I’m looking forward to the game being out that and seeing exactly what a load of new players can do with it!