Shortfuse Games, a Swedish games developer and digital publisher of the well-received Xbox LIVE Indie Games title Colosseum, today announced their next title in development is the dark, gory, combat focused Alive & Undead.

 

Currently in development using the rapid iteration and rapid development powers of Gamebryo® LightSpeed™ from Emergent Game Technologies, Alive & Undead is planned for release on PlayStation®Network in the fall of 2010.

“Alive & Undead is a brutal, uncensored vampire quest sprinkled with clichés of both side-scrolling beat-em-ups and sub culture phenomena,” said Johan Hermerén, president of Shortfuse Games. “After the success of Colosseum, we focused on expanding our creative storytelling abilities and interweaving it with intricate fighting sequences. As players work toward avenging the vampire curse, they’ll encounter a horde of crazy undead creatures to battle!”

Hermerén continued, “We evaluated other engines and we chose Emergent’s technology first for Colosseum and now for Alive & Undead because its power and versatility suited our needs. It allows us to be incredibly creative while being flexible enough to adapt to our studio’s evolving development goals, from use developing a 3rd person brawler with Colosseum on Xbox Live to creating a 2D side-scroller co-op shooter for PSN. Its multi-platform abilities and easy integration with third party middleware enable us to meet aggressive production schedules with a minimum amount of stress.”

Alive and Undead takes the form of a classic, side-scrolling, 2-player brawler. Choose from two charismatic characters: Mr. Smith, an Elvis impersonator who has suffered the misfortune of being turned into a vampire, or Welson, a femme-fatale witch hunter. Though his unquenchable vampire bloodlust, Mr. Smith has killed his entire family. In order to avenge his family and free himself from the curse of vampirism, he solicits the help of Welson. Together the unlikely heroes use an over-the-top arsenal to battle hoards of undead and other frightful creatures on a fantastically violent quest to destroy the one responsible for Mr. Smith’s calamitous, blood-sucking condition.

Alive and Undead is cocky, uncensored, brutal and kick-ass. It delivers the classic formula of the side-scrolling brawler and improves on it by incorporating modern mechanics like the ability to juggle enemies in the air, as well as a variety of explosive and devastating co-op attacks.