“Our goal was to use Ryu’s abilities from Ninja Gaiden III as a foundation, ensuring that all the classic techniques fans loved from the 2D series were faithfully brought into Ragebound. From there, we started crafting a new set of abilities tailored to our original characters and the game’s own vision,” Jaumandreu observes. “Kenji, as Ryu’s disciple, masters the art of the blade with precise yet powerful slashes and can make use of talismans. Kumori, on the other hand, specializes in rapid, aggressive bursts of deadly kunai and is trained to use a variety of lethal ninja weapons.”
Just as Dotemu had revitalized the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles video game franchise with its 2022 beat ’em up Shredder’s Revenge, the company is doing the same for the classic Marvel brawlers that dominated the arcades in the early ‘90s. Slated for release later in 2025 is MARVEL Cosmic Invasion, maintaining the same timeless gameplay from Shredder’s Revenge but to a colorful rendition of the Marvel Universe. Evoking arcade games like Captain America and the Avengers and 1992’s X-Men, the game draws its inspiration directly from the comics while giving each playable character in its roster their own distinct vibe.
“Our goal with designing each superhero was to make sure they express themselves as closely as they would in the comics,” game director Frederic Gemus says. “We designed them with high level archetypes and combined these different play styles in ways that characters can share a common language while making sure that they were unique.”
As a significant increase from the scope of Shredder’s Revenge, MARVEL Cosmic Invasion boasts 15 playable characters, nine of whom having already been publicly announced. Whether it’s Wolverine getting up close and personal with his adamantium claws or Venom swinging in like a wrecking ball with his symbiote tentacles, each character dispatches waves of enemies in ways that feel true to the source material. In addition to their solo attacks, the characters can also team-up for devastating moves that often clear the screen of enemies, while unique to the pairing, something Dotemu was careful to bring to life.
“Having a cast of 15 superheroes working in tandem means hundreds of different possible combinations, so in order to make things more accessible for the player, we kept a similar logic between each team ups, where the inputs would result in similar types of assists when using the Cosmic Swap,” Gemus says. “Afterwards, it is just a matter of making sure that each superhero’s assist is finely tuned to be awesome-looking and useful in the middle of a brawl!”
In addition to its upcoming licensed games, Dotemu is also working on its own original IP with the fantasy roguelite beat ‘em up Absolum, also due for release in 2025. Players choose from a variety of fantasy genre archetypes and embark on an epic journey, complete with branching paths, as they battle through waves of monsters in classic side-scrolling combat. These elements, along with the arcade-style gameplay strongly add a dimension of replayability to experience the full breadth of the game and its impressive depth.
