Warco Looks Like the Unlikely, Fascinating Marriage of Battlefield and Pokemon Snap

Warco is the most captivating first-person shooter concept of the year. That’s because Warco arms its players with nothing more than a flak jacket and a video camera, capturing the violence of Middle Eastern and African conflicts not as a super soldier, but as a combat reporter.

This unexpected blend of first-person shooter and journalism—part Battlefield, part Pokemon Snap (or Michigan: Report from Hell, if you know what that is)—puts its players in the role of war correspondent Jess DeMarco, who, instead of firing an AK-47 or M4 of her own, is “framing shots, panning and zooming, grabbing powerful images of combatants and civilians caught up in war.”

“Record dramatic images of war, save them in-game, then edit the results into a compelling frontline TV news story,” reads the off-beat war game’s official description. “Beam the results to global audiences on the web. No two WARCO stories will ever be alike.” The game’s first proof of concept trailer highlights some of the embedded objectives and the dangers of Warco, a look at what makes this FPS different from the rest.

Warco‘s developer alludes to the shooter being more than just video game entertainment, touting the prototype as a “a powerful entry-level training tool for future combat reporters.”

Responsible is Brisbane-based studio Defiant Development who are working alongside filmmaker Robert Connolly and journalist Tony Maniaty on the title, currently running on the Unreal Dev Kit.

Warco [Defiant Development via GameSetWatch]

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