Project EVE – Combat Mechanics and Story Details Explained for New Hack & Slash Adventure

written by Naufal Rasyidin

After the rise and fame of NieR: Automata, many try to fill in its shoes before the sequel comes out. One of them is Project EVE from SHIFT UP. SHIFT UP is a South Korean game studio founded in 2013 by Hyung-Tae Kim, the man behind “Blade & Soul” and “The War of Genesis 3”. SHIFT UP’s first mobile game, titled “Destiny Child”, climbed the top of Grossing App upon its release in 2016 in South Korea, on both the App Store and Google Play. This shows the studio’s strong game development and quality.

Starting from 2019, SHIFT UP is developing their newest AAA game, titled “Project EVE”, a semi-open-world, hack-and-slash video game, that looked heavily inspired by NieR: Automata, but adding their own spice to the flavor. From the teaser trailer, we can see that our main character, Eve, is most likely an android or a clone that wakes up late in her pod, into a post-apocalyptic world. When she wakes up, she sees remains of bodies similar to her and seem that they have gone through a battle, or crashed after a hard landing of their aerial pod. Now that Eve is the only one who survives, she has to explore the world while fighting monsters called NA-tives, unknown invaders that need to be defeated to reclaim the lost earth after its collapses.

SHIFT UP is truly going all out with the games’ extraordinary graphic and character designs. Hyung-Tae Kim says that their process of 3D scanning ensures that characters in Project EVE explode with distinctive realism, and he is not kidding with his statement. We can see in the trailer that Project EVE is the next level in term of graphics and its physics, and suitable for the next-gen console and high-end PC.

SHIFT UP also released a gameplay video so that we can catch a glimpse of what we’ll be expecting in the game. In the video, we can see that Eve is entering an area where an NA-tive monster with a chainsaw-looking head is lurking. When the fight begins, we can see Eve pulling out a one-handed sword. Sadly, it’s the only weapon that we can see so far, but it’s not wrong to expect more in the future of the actual game.

From the video, the fighting style is a mix between NieR: Automata and Devil May Cry, but with a little bit of a Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice kind of style. It has a basic hack-and-slash style like NieR and DMC with combos and parries, but the enemy system is more Souls-like as they have a pattern of movement and attacks that players can take note of and will know when to evade or when to parry, or even launch a special combo to inflict maximum damage to the enemy. With all that said, it seems that the fighting mechanic is still lacking some flexibility even though Eve can maneuver and slash the enemy beautifully. It feels like it needs some more effect to the enemy when she delivers those light attacks so players can feel more satisfied when they are able to land those hits. But as this is not the final production of the game, maybe they will add more into it later.

The interesting thing from the gameplay video is that the fighting will have some cinematic effect when either the player or the enemy can land a special move like a special counter-attack or grabbing attack, and a special hotkey when players can finally do a finishing move to the weakened enemy. This feels more like God of War, and it really adds more spice and style to the game.

The only thing that we need to know now is about world exploration. So far, SHIFT UP never really shown us how we will traverse the world of Project EVE, and whether will it have a leveling system, skill system, equipment system, weapon system, etc. The only thing SHIFT UP has shown us that we can change the character’s outfits from the released screenshots. Hopefully, they will give us a satisfying amount of open-world exploration and a decent skill and weapon system when the game is released.

As SHIFT UP states, they want the game developed to show maximum performance on various platforms and how SHIFT UP wants to be a global multi-platform developer, Project EVE will be coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X, even though they still haven’t got a fixed released date.