The Grinder, being developed by High Voltage Games, has been announced and public knowledge for over a year now. But if you think you know anything about this game, you’re dead wrong.
This game has changed platform, changed game style, changed direction entirely. Throw everything you thought you knew aside, as we show you the grisly new gameplay that The Grinder has to offer.
We bumped into some of the creative staff behind The Grinder while at E3. Art Director Matt Corso and Chief Creative Officer Eric Nofsinger were cool enough to give us a hands-on, guided tour of their new game.
For those unfamiliar with it, The Grinder is named after the location of the story, a mine in an alternate Earth where highly valuable ‘Storm Crystals’ are harvested and ground from the rocks below. These crystals are imbued with magical energy, and grant powers and amazing scientific breakthroughs to those who use them. But now, the workers who dig for these precious Gems have gone too far. The Earth beneath them has cracked open, and from the cavernous maw comes a plague of Vampires, Ghosts, Demons, and all of the creatures of the night to feast upon the miners. 
Called in to counter the demonic invasion is a list of four badasses ripped right from a Robert Rodriguez movie. You’ve got a Mexican bounty hunter, a Native American doctor hoping to collect monster specimens for experiments, a Japanese schoolgirl/assassin, and a ‘survivor girl’ last woman standing after a slasher attack wiped out her sorority sisters. Each of the characters has variations on speed, damage, and control, as you would expect. Each also has their own unique and customizable skill and special power set, so you can find and refine the one that best suits your playtype.
Originally, all of this awesomeness was slated to be exclusive to the Wii. When we were first introduced to The Grinder, it was a first-person shooter. Over time, that has changed. The guys at High Voltage are best known for their popular Hunter: The Reckoning series for the Xbox; while they were developing the Wii game, they took a look at the 360’s game library and realized there was one major omission, the top-down hack & slash genre had almost no titles to its name. The multi-player dungeon crawl, once popularized by Hunter and other games like Baldur’s Gate, virtually nowhere to be found. Looking for an excuse to further explore the platform in ways Hunter’s proprietary license wouldn’t allow, the crew happily converted their story and game ideas back into the comfortable mold, and then began to build on top of that, using their own notes, and comments from fans, as a foundation.
New additions to the Hunter formula offer some very unique abilities, notably the ability to charge up your characters and turn into the monsters yourself. Werewolves were the name of the game in the demo we played, Vampires and other ghoulies promised to come. Another interesting feature is the interactive co-op cinema event. Throughout the game the hunters are plagued by Slasher, a hulking, Mike Meyers-type brute who takes a tremendous beating, and always seems miraculously come back from the dead. Fighting him off takes a split-screen, four way battle, timed button presses similar to Resident Evil are prevalent, but featuring the four protagonists interweaving in new ways to liven things up. Everything possible should be cooperative.
As if the gameplay weren’t enough, horror and sci-fi genre fans will find a ton of easter eggs shoved into the game. The developers used stacks and stacks of horror flicks for inspiration, from Universal Horror to grindhouse flicks to get visual style, monster ideas, and even infused the game with its own black, splattery sense of humor. There are elements of steam punk, grindhouse, Lovecraftian creatures; there’s a little something here for every horror nerd. Frankenstein monsters are afraid of fire, vampires are killed by stakes, werewolves by silver. All of the classic movie-monster legends and weaknesses are here, and entwined with the gameplay.
So, all of this is cool, but what about the Wii owners? According to the developers, the Wii version is still on its way, though it was heavily delayed by the creation of this 360 one. “We were really hit with inspiration and dove right into [the 360 version]. But we’ve put a lot of time and development into the Wii version. I can’t imagine it not being released as well.” How similar would the story and game features be? Would it be the same game, just converted to FPS mode? “These things are always changing, but I think there will be some differences. Its hard to convey the monster transformations in first person, so there will probably be some other features instead… The story will probably be congruent but unique. We want to give the Wii owners something different, something special for buying that version.”
As a fan of top-down monster mashers, dungeon crawls, and horror movies good and bad, I was pretty enthralled by The Grinder. Like so many games now, its one that has a particular niche that its serving. Fans of super-realism and FPS games may not find what they want here ( and will have to wait to see what the Wii version offers), but if you like bustin’ werewolf skulls and using babies to bait Vampires onto your waiting stakes, The Grinder is going to be a treat custom made for you.
Thanks to High Voltage for letting me check out this early version of the game, and for just being cool guys in general. If you’re a fan of the Hunter series, or curious about The Grinder, go to High-Voltage.com and give them some feedback. They obviously take very seriously what their players have to say about their games. Also, check out Andrew’s look at their new Wii shooter, Conduit 2 , being published this year by Sega.
And just so you guys get a feel for how much this game has changed over time, here’s some E3 footage. The first is the trailer from ’09, showing the Wii gameplay, and the second is some gameplay footage from the 360 demo:
