Here is a cool news item about a cool game called Fragmental

The original name for this news item was “Ruffian Games’ Fragmental now up on Steam Greenlight,” but that seemed a bit too in keeping with the norm. Fragmental seems a bit abnormal when compared to other 4-player couch competitive games, so I went for something different. A quick glance at the images, gifs, and videos on the Steam Greenlight page is testament to this, with the game boasting eye popping vivid neon lights mixed with an “OMG my VCR is broken” aesthetic to create something very unique.

It has been very noticeable that highly-replayable two-to-four player couch-competitive games have been the rage for quite a while now. Towerfall Ascension, Samurai Gunn, Lethal League, Duck Game, Crawl, Gang Beasts, Nidhogg and a whole bunch more have come and gone, with others still only coming. Compared to these, Fragmental looks different, and certainly sounds a bit different, but it still finds good company with many of those games. Here is a trailer.

As you can see, this is a Ruffian Games project, who are perhaps most famous for their work on Crackdown 2. The team have had collaborations with developers to bring other games to market as well, including Halo: The Master Chief Collection and a bunch of Kinect enabled titles. The studio boasts talent that worked on the likes of the Crackdown, Fable II and Project Gotham Racing in past years.

So what is Fragmental? Well, other than a great looking local and online competitive game with a bunch of weapons and maps, according to Ruffian it is also this:

[W]e genuinely think that what we’re working on is fantastic fun to play. It’s stupidly fast, it takes a fair bit of skill to get really good at, you constantly need to alter your tactics based on the weapon you have, the environment around and the weapon your opponents have as well as the environment around them too. It’s got that “one more game” desire about it too, which is always really hard to get when making a game.

Ruffian are running a dev blog for the game, if you are interested in the behind the scenes on how the sausage is made. Work is currently progressing on the game, and the move to Steam Greenlight is a good sign everything is going in the right direction. It seems as if playable builds will be ready in Early 2016, but it is however unknown at what point the game will be made available to the public.

The synthy-electronic track from the trailer is Arena by Sung, and there is a whole EP of songs up on Bandcamp if you are looking for something great to listen to.