At Gamescom 2025 we were treated to the gameplay reveal trailer of Cinder City, formerly Project LLL: an MMO shooter from NCsoft:
South Korean games like this take pride in allowing you to create the prettiest woman or man you can think of for their multiplayer games though Cinder City gives you the rare opportunity to also play a robot if you want.
Being an MMO tactical shooter is a fun an interesting take on the multiplayer corner that South Korean developers such as NCsoft have been trying to corner for a while now. We get a glimpse of what the story could contain: a post apocalyptic city is overrun by a zombie outbreak of some kind, robots both big and small are roaming around and need to be shot, but the drama and the seriousness of the zombie melodrama is immediately undercut by the player shown riding a motorcycle through a ruined city block and realizing this is an MMO where you can stick your buds in a Humvee and drive off a cliff.
The exact tone and pace of the game is hard to pin down. One minute we see a somber cutscene of a presumed father holding the zombified body of his daughter and the next you’ve got a high octane firefight with a rocket man using bazookas before a hard cut to a slow paced clearing a hospital of more zombies before another cut to a small army of players gunning for a giant mech boss in the town square, all to a pretty catchy theme song.
The gist of this is basically: you like guns? You like robots? Well this trailer showed off plenty of both, and the ability to traverse the terrain in vehicles ranging from motorcycles to helicopters to even your own mechs which is always a disaster, a fun disaster mind you, when it comes to multiplayer games. We can see legions of players making a mad dash at a giant mech that will probably mow them down en masse, Cinder City looks like it’ll be a fun game to play with your friends once it releases in 2026.