At the dawn of the 21st century, NewGrounds was one of the biggest websites to host collections of Flash games and animations on the Internet. While its heyday may have passed, its founders and some of its best creators are teaming up to create a cartoon platform brawler known as Nightmare Cops. The teaser trailer for their new game appeared yesterday.
The game looks to be about a group of cops who clean up people’s persistent, larger-than-life nightmares, because the average person’s experience at high school isn’t nightmarish enough. As well as classic brawling sections, the game appears to have some platforming sections and some sort of overworld where you drive around in your crew’s van. From the trailer, there’s at least three, possibly four, characters (the ones we see in-game are based on the classic archetypes of balanced guy, slow but beefy guy, and fast girl) with three-player co-op. Combat appears to have a decent bit of maneuverability options, with attack cancels, air-dashes, and grappling hooks, so it’ll hopefully have a bit more depth than Castle Crashers.
The coding is being done by Tom Fulp, the founder of NewGrounds. He previously did work under The Behemoth creating games such as Castle Crashers, Battleblock Theater, and Pit People, but he’s now working with some other NewGrounds creators. On the art side we have ‘JohnnyUtah’ and the unfortunately pseudonymed ‘SpazKid’. Bandcamp user ‘zircon’ did the trailer music, and NewGrounds user ‘Oney’ will be on general soundtrack duty. While the game doesn’t exactly seem subtle or especially mature, brawlers generally are a genre not particularly worried about nuance or complex stories.
There’s no release date set for Nightmare Cops yet, but it’ll be coming out for Steam and Xbox One. You can follow their Twitter here for more updates as they arrive.