Upcoming singleplayer action game SPINE is a little bit John Woo, a little bit John Wick, and a little bit Batman: Arkham Asylum. The whole thing comes together in a whirlwind of frenetic "Gun Fu" chaos set in a grim cyberpunk future. 

Developer Nekki has been making games using its proprietary animation software Cascadeur since its founding in Cyprus in 2002. SPINE Game Director Dmitry Pimenov said the studio often uses its games to showcase the animation work of its tech.

“We felt we needed to create a game about camera work as well as animations, and also work with firearms,” he said. “That’s how the idea of Gun Fu combat came to be.”

For the uninitiated, Gun Fu is a style of close-quarters fighting that combines shooting off guns with hand-to-hand combat. The style was originated by famed Hong Kong action film director John Woo in his 1985 film A Better Tomorrow starring Chow Yun-fat. The popularity of Woo’s movies and that particular style of action eventually spread to the USA, where it was seen in movies like Desperado and The Matrix—and perhaps most famously (and most recently), it's the driving force behind the John Wick films.

Games, of course, have made use of the style quite a bit as well, from the bullet time of Max Payne to the over-the-top combat of Bayonetta and rhythm-action of Pistol Whip.

“The elevator pitch for SPINE is that it’s a free-flowing action game about Gun Fu in a cyberpunk world,” Pimenov said.  “It follows the story of a main character called Redline, who gets hold of a powerful sentient combat implant called SPINE that boosts her reflexes and allows her to do all of this hero stuff.”

The controls for the game are reminiscent of Batman: Arkham Asylum, with face buttons allowing you to attack, combo, dodge, and block, while the trigger is used for shooting, using spray paint to confuse a crowd of attackers, and melee parries. 

The first scene in the SPINE demo at Summer Game Fest opens inside a seedy bar where Redline is being blamed for killing a bunch of people. Redline flip-kicks, pistol whips, shoots, and twirls through the air as she empties the bar of living attackers, ping-ponging between attackers and using the spiky red and blue warning bubble above her head to avoid incoming shots. Being able to quickly flow between melee attacks and staccato bursts of gunfire really hammers home the game's Gun Fu inspirations. If you weaken an enemy enough as you dance around your crowd of attackers, you can tap the bottom and left face buttons together to perform a quick, cinematic take-down of the character.

The action initially unfolds in a pulled back third-person, but later in a crowded room, the view shifts to top-down, allowing you to take out the baddies in a clever homage to John Wick.

“We treat every mission as a short movie on its own,” Pimenov said. “That’s why we have different references for different missions. When we began working on this project, I wrote down the scenes I wanted to see in the game, like a fight on a rooftop or on the roof of a train, a fight in a dojo, and so on. After that, we built a story around those lines of interest to try to make it all coherent.

“This one takes place in something like a walled city. It’s one of the first missions in the game and is quite easy because you need to learn how everything works here.”

The camera actually controls itself as you fight, leaving you to focus on how you’re going to take down enemies rather than how the scene is framed.

The demo is focused almost entirely on SPINE's action, so we don’t get into what the studio promises will be a gripping narrative that has Redline and her AI implant taking on an “oppressive AI regime.” While there is no narrative, I do note a couple of things, like that all of the people in certain areas wear VR headsets and seemingly sway mindlessly in place wherever they stand. 

The demo wraps up with a chance to take on a boss. In the fight, I have to focus on taking out Edda Kopp, a lanky, machine-gun toting fighter dressed all in black, with the ability to disappear at just the wrong times in a fight. 

Before the showdown starts, Pimenov leans over and asks me if I have arachnophobia. When the boss fight starts, I understand why: Kopp also seems able to control red spider-like drones that act a bit like walking landmines. They start on the ceiling and, as we fight, start to creepy-crawl around the room, getting underfoot and exploding. It’s a distracting, slightly unnerving danger that makes facing off against Kopp all the more challenging.

SPINE is expected to be out next year on the Epic Games Store.