Total Recoil Deploys On Vita July 9th

What good are the PlayStation Vita’s twin analog sticks if there aren’t a bunch of twin-stick shooters to take advantage of the things? Thankfully, Eiconic Games feels our pain, which is why they’re delivering Total Recoil to Sony’s handheld machine on July 9.

Total Recoil, at its core, is the quintessential twin-stick shooter. You play as a soldier on a quest to do two things, according to a recent post on the PlayStation Blog: Shoot everything that moves and shoot everything that doesn’t. The left stick moves your character and the right stick shoots. It’s as simple as that. Sure, you’ll get some special abilities and upgrades along the way but, from the looks of things, 99.9 percent of your time in the game will be spent filling enemy soldiers and tanks full of holes.

According to Eiconic Art and Creative Director Simon Credland, the idea for Total Recoil actually came from playing the biggest, baddest shooter on the planet: Call of Duty.

“So this started me wondering how a modern game would look on an arcade cabinet,” Credland said. “It would be top-down, the characters would have large heads, there would be wave after wave of baddies with flamethrowers, huge tans and attack copters, and this is what you get with Total Recoil.”

Rather than make an arcade game, though, Credland decided to develop for the Vita, which he said offers better control options for mobile or tablet. And his team took advantage of all of them, too, utilizing the rear touch to guide rockets and front touch to pilot the helicopters you call in for support. This is great news for Vita gamers who were looking for a title that took full advantage of the portable device's capabilities.

As you can see from the trailer, Total Recoil offers all of the standard tools of destruction, including a laser-sited assault rifle, chaingun, flamethrower, grenade launcher and missile launcher. And just to keep things light and fresh, you can also make use of a tesla gun to give your enemies a deadly shock, or hit them with a blast from the hornet cannon.

“Being an independent studio means we can make the game we’d like to play and add as many cool features that we can think of,” Credland continued. “In fact, we had so many ideas it was a struggle to get them all into the game in the time we had.”

They managed just fine, apparently, as Total Recoil is set to hit the PlayStation Vita via PlayStation Network on July 9.

As a final note, Credland points out that Total Recoil features the voice of Tony the Tiger himself, Tom Clarke Hill. That’s gotta earn it some “cool points,” yes?