Tension – we’re hooked!

Godawful wordplay aside, time for a tip of the hat to modders Cracked Glass games and Tension, their Source engine total conversion that’s currently looking very promising. First-person grappling hooks, basically. Sure, we’ve seen grappling hooks and rope-swinging on PC before, even leaping, falling and obstacle courses, but there’s a nice, clean simplicity to the preview screens and pre-alpha work that suggests this lot have their priorities down right. More thoughts, and the most recent trailer, after the break.

No complicated backstory – there is a plot, all about ecological disaster and rising sea levels, but to their credit they avoid rambling on about it at length before the mod’s even done. No laundry list of bigger and bigger guns, at least not just yet. What we’ve got is some impressively fluid movement swinging over, under and through their test maps that gives a strong impression this could be a lot of fun to play around with. They’re largely using placeholder textures but the arcade minimalism of the alpha levels is actually pretty attractive, too; they talk about puzzles, racing and time trials, so however much the artistic direction changes it seems they’re going for something of a pick-up-and-play approach.

Personally? Mod team or not, ancient engine or not, I’m still more than interested. Despite the obvious elephants swinging through the room, I don’t think even the professional competition is quite what it could be. Capcom and Grin somehow conspired to make the Bionic Commando remake, well, boring, with tiny, restrictive levels, instant deaths and not much opportunity to show off. Mirror’s Edge squandered a lot of its potential when it turned out it wasn’t a free-running game at all, really, more a racing game on foot – and whisper it softly; I don’t actually like Spiderman that much, so any of his games are wasted on me.

Cracked Glass have some concept art up, some alpha and pre-alpha screens, some music and a range of videos spanning the mod’s development so far. They’ve been going for a while, but the updates seem to have been coming reasonably regularly, and they’re (probably sensibly) not committing themselves to any firm release date just yet. Definitely one to keep an eye on, and fingers crossed they can eventually get this one out of the door.

The ModDB page for Tension is here. Go take a look.