When most people think about top-down shooters, they start thinking about games like Geometry Wars and Robotron where the player is constantly shooting enemies. It’s often a non-stop barrage of foes, and the action stays at an intense level the entire time. That isn’t the case with Exploding Tuba Studios’ Divide, a top-down shooter that is attempting to show that the genre has a lot more to offer.
Unlike most titles in the genre, Divide has a focus on storytelling not action. That’s not to say that firefights won’t be had (although I was told that the game didn’t have combat originally), but that the game has a bigger focus on narration and letting the player explore its world. Even during the short demo I played, I was able to go minutes without firing a shot of my rad laser-equipped gun, so this definitely isn’t the typical top-down shooter. Combat
Exploding Tuba Studios was showing off two separate demos for Divide, and I got to check out both of them. The first one I played took place right at the very beginning of the game, and was meant to show off the game’s combat in action. I controlled a guy named David, who was seemingly infiltrating some sort of base with a female partner. The story was left to be pretty ambiguous at this point, as it’s one of the game’s core focuses, so I didn’t get a great feel for much of the narrative beyond that David somehow gets sucked into another world and has so...