Capcom unveils Spyborgs for Wii News

Capcom has officially unveiled Wii-exclusive action game Spyborgs, promising a Saturday morning cartoon-style experience designed primarily for two players.

Developed by Bionic Games, Spyborgs introduces a team of super-spies - Bouncer, a big robot, and Kinetic, an extreme sports nut, were shown off at Captivate 08 in Las Vegas last week, while others include Stinger, Voxel and Clandestine.

Gameplay is from a pulled-back third-person perspective, and involves smashing up enemies and solving puzzles co-operatively using a mixture of analogue stick and button attacks and Wiimote gestures. Environments in the sewer section we saw were basic but stylised, with comedy enemies like flying crocodiles with rocket launchers and poo-covered teddy bears.

To give the game a cartoon feel, the campaign will be split into "episodes" and each will actually have advertising breaks - playable joke mini-games with gesture controls, like a rhythm-action banjo session promoting a plumbing firm called 2FISTED, and a frenzied boxing game for Nukem Now Robots.

Although ostensibly for two players, with basic puzzle design derived from this, the game will also work as a single-player experience with the AI controlling the second character. Each level will use a combination of two characters, whose abilities range from powerful punch attacks (Wii Sports boxing-style motions) to things like acrobatics and skills with bladed weapons.

There will also be rail-shooting sections and showpiece boss fights, and some sections where the whole Spyborgs team assembles.

From what we saw, Spyborgs looks like it has a younger focus, although "all the leads on the team at ex-Insomniac" and they hope the humour from games like Ratchet & Clank will cross over to grown-ups like you and me. Well, you anyway.

Bionic was also adamant that Spyborgs is not a mini-game compilation or throwaway exercise for the team, which has been assembled specifically for its production. "We want to be on the Wii - we don't want to port over a game like everyone else," designer Mike Stout explained. "Most of the games on the Wii are ports or micro-games and we think gamers are getting sick of that," he explained.

Bionic Games told journos at Captivate 08 that the game is "pretty early in development" and will be out in 2009. Check out our screenshot gallery to see how it looks.