I’m unsure how much of a detective game Artificial Detective will be, but I enjoyed the bit in the trailer when your character attacks a robot with a massive drill

Move over, Nick Valentine, there’s another synthetic sleuth in town. Revealed at this week’s Xbox Partner Preview, Artificial Detective is a new action adventure game from neophyte studio Vivix, composed of former developers of games like Dead Space, Control, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Artificial Detective sees you play as a robotic gumshoe in a futuristic metropolis where humanity has disappeared. With the world controlled by robots and prowled by animals infected with a strange nanotechnological disease, you take it upon yourself to discover what happened to all those quivering meatbags, and how the world came to be as it is.

The reveal trailer is mostly pre-rendered footage, but there are snippets of the game interspersed throughout. These suggest Artificial Detective follows a fairly standard action-adventure template of exploring, combat, and light puzzle-solving. There’s a neat clip where your character charges at a hulking robot with a pneumatic drill slung under their arm, which is exactly the kind of preposterous action that I endorse.

Artificial Detective’s Steam page, meanwhile, suggests that the game will be, if not open world, then certainly nonlinear. It says players will be able to “ride a flying streetcar” across 10 districts of the city, and will feature sandbox encounters where you can shoot, sneak, or weaponise the environment (immersive sim confirmed?). Exploration will also be “companion-driven”, with you receiving help from a small child and a robotic dog on your journey.

My guess is Artificial Detective will play like the newer God of War games in structure, technically open-ended, but heavily directed in practice. One thing I didn’t see in the reveal trailer is a whole lot of detective work. Which isn’t necessarily a problem. Glossy action adventures are few and far between at present, so I’ll take whatever’s being offered. That said, given how detective games are an established genre now, that may lead to certain expectations for a game called Artificial Detective which did not exist previously.

But maybe there’s more sleuthing in the final game than is evident from the initial trailer. Either way, I’m excited to see how Artificial Detective shapes up when it releases sometime next year.

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