XLR8’s ability slows down time in an area and he can just race by enemies beating the crap out of them. These are usually crowd control abilities that can damage and knock enemies back when Ben is overwhelmed. He will also have to change forms in order to reach different areas of a level.Įach alien form has a special alien power that uses up a meter that is filled while attacking. Ben transforms to fight his enemies using different attacks. As far as a gameplay standpoint goes, this is the main mechanic. Ben wears an alien bracelet that allows him to transform into 10 different alien forms that gives him extraordinary power. I figure “why not?” Now that I’ve played it, I really didn’t mind it at all.īen10 is a 2.5D side scrolling beat ‘em up where players control Ben as he traverses levels pretty much beating up anything that he comes upon. All of a sudden, my Editor-In-Chief asks me to review a new Ben10 game. I know it was a cartoon show on Cartoon Network for years and then they created a reboot of the franchise. “That’s the last thing a developer wants - to spend all this time making a game and nobody likes it.I know absolutely nothing about Ben10. “We were seeing exactly what we were going for,” Madonna said. The team also spent Friday celebrating by watching players on Twitch and hearing positive reviews.
“It’s been a sigh of relief, people getting to see this project, and seeing the reactions from the kids, how much they’ve enjoyed it.” “It’s the first one we can see in a display case,” King said of the release last week. The company had to finish the game in the spring so that there was time for manufacturing and marketing, and on Friday, King and Madonna went to GameStop to see the project on shelves for the first time. The founder said it’s an accomplishment to be a Philly company releasing a major game in stores, as the city’s not really known for being a game developer town ( though the indie scene is strong). “It taught us a lot of lessons about how we’re able to adapt pretty quickly.” “It was stressful at the time, but it’s a testament to the team we had and being able to reconfigure and hit all these milestones,” Madonna said. There were also plenty of technical challenges, King said, like dispersing the tech to test the game on its different platforms like PCs, Xbox or Switch: “Every digital platform has their own set of requirements.” Whereas they’d typically gather around consoles testing the game, they needed to do so remotely, at home. Players can roam the map, where they’ll face puzzles, events and trinkets to create lively game play, he said.Ī post shared by PHL Collective lead up to a project launch is pressure filled for any developer, but back in the spring, as the team was hitting their deadlines and working through bugs, they were forced to go remote because of the pandemic. The game doesn’t follow a fixed point-A-to-point-B arc, said Bren King, art director and co-owner. “We could give the fans of Ben 10 something they hasn’t existed before and give kids an onramp for a great first step into open world genre.” “When this opportunity presented itself, we felt we had a pretty good understanding of what the fans are looking for,” Madonna said. And it’s the first PHL Collective game that involves a release in stores and that’s played in a gaming console. The company recently worked with the cartoon empire on a VR experience at the Cartoon Network hotel in Lancaster, and it’s also produced Tom and Jerry Colossal Catastrophe with the classic characters in a Halloween-themed game.īut the release of Ben 10: Power Trip, which the studio worked on for about two years, is its largest project so far, Madonna said, because of the scale of the game. The relationship with Cartoon Network has existed pretty much since PHL Collective started in 2013, founder and co-owner Nick Madonna told Technical.ly. The storyline includes characters from the show “ Ben 10” and is aimed at a younger audience (with an E10+ rating). 9, the Old City-based company released Ben 10: Power Trip, a Cartoon Network-licensed open world game where players can roam around, complete tasks, find collectibles and battle enemies in a non-linear fashion. Video game studio PHL Collective probably didn’t expect the 2020 difficulty spike, but the 22-person company just released its largest project to date all the same.