In a sea of game delays this opening season of 2020, gamers should be able to take comfort in the fact that titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and Final Fantasy VII Remake have not been outright canceled. Well, they are safe for the moment at least. The s🅷𓃲ame cannot be said for the following ten action-based games.
It just goes to show that, for whatever reason, companies big and small have to let projects go. It may sound bad in the immediate moments following a cancelation, but sometimes this could be a good thing know. Fans will never know why, or ho♛w, but learning can be just as fun as playing so let’s dive into some lost treasures.
10 Strelka Stories
Strelka Stories was going to be the third entry in the CyberConnect2’s Little Tail Bronx series, which started with their very first game, Tail Concerto. Think of these games like steampunk versions of Disney cartoons like Tail Spin. This was in development for PS3, announc💛ed in 2010. All that exists are a few statements from the company about their vision involving space along with some concept art. All of this can be viewed on .
9 Project H.A.M.M.E.R.
Project H.A.M.M.E.R. was planned for the Wii and was being developed internally within Nintendo. It was shown off at E3 2006 with a trailer. There are some screenshots saved on🍷 as well, but they are practically no bigger than a postage stamp thus serving no real value.
As for what the game was, playe﷽rs would be a Cyborg with a giant hammer, fighting robots in defense of the U.S. It was worked on for a✅bout five years before it was officially canceled, which, if one thinks about it, spanned over half the Wii’s lifespan.
8 LMNO
LMNO was a project for PS3 and Xbox 360, which was a partnership between Steven Spielberg and EA. In 2005, the company made an agreement with Spielberg to make not just this, but another game as well, Boom Blox, which did come out. LMNO was described as being a first-person parkour-like RPG, which made it sound like the beginnings of a game EA would later fund, Mirror’s Edge. A coup🙈e screenshots exist along with two teasers focusing on what appears to be the main character,ꦅ Lincoln, protecting an alien-like woman, Eve. All of this can be viewed on .
7 The Lord of the Rings: The Treason of Isengard
The Lord of the Rings: The Treason of Isengard was in development for the PS2 and original Xbox via Black Label Games and Vivendi Universal. A few small, blurry screenshots can be seen on along with a brief gameplay trailer. Said trailer even had a tentative date for it, November 2003, but it obviously wouldn’t make that date. Based on the footage, it looked similar to the EA hack and slash RPGs based on the second and third movies. Interestingly they also worked on a game based on Fellowship of the Ring, which followed the books rather than the film.
6 Heavenly Sword 2
One of the PS3’s earliest hits was 2007’s Heavenly Sword, but due to the game’s low sales, the team puꦿrsued other projects instead of a sequel. Sony’s Cambridge Studio, on the other hand, was actually in works to make a sequel to it. It didn’t make it far into production before being canned and only a few small pieces of artwork exist on .
However t﷽hat, in an interview with AMN in 2007 prior to the game’s launch, the co-founder of the company, Tam Antoniades, said they wanted to make the game into a trilogy and that work on the second’s story had already ღstarted. The archive for that full interview is now gone, but a brief snippet of it was archived via report.
5 Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun
Legacy of Kain: Dead Sun was in development for the then next-gen systems and PC. This was around 2009 and the game was never even announced officially. A NeoGAF user, Mama Robotnik, actually the game’s existence, which later led to Square Enix revealing that the game was real in 2013, but it was canceled a year prior. This was in the announcement of Nosgoth, which started out as th🐻e multiplayer portion of that game. T💫hat same NeoGAF user uploaded over thirty minutes of from the game. For those curious, Nosgoth too was canceled as of 2016.
4 Fighting Force 3
Speaking of former Eidos related games, a third sequel to Fighting Force was planned for PS2 and Xbox around 2002. Fighting Force, for those that don’t recall, was a 3D action game in the style of retro beat ‘em ups although the second game incorporated more shooting elements. Anyway, there are a few screenshots remaining from the game’s design documents along with a deep dive into what went wrong with the development via who also managed to sn🔴ag some fo♔otage of the game.
3 PreCore
After worked finished on Metroid Prime 3 in 2008, some of Retro Studios’ developers left to start a new company, Armature Studio. Even though they came from an acclaimed Nintendo trilogy, work could not get off the ground smoothly with multiple deals falling through in their first few years. “PreCore” is the name Unseen64 has given this title as it was before Armature Studio made ReCore, which shared a lot of themes like the apocalyptic setting with robot companions. The brief thirteen-second trailer uploaded has no sound, but it actually does look like ReCore in some fashion.
2 Kunio-kun: The Claw of Kowloon
Kunio-kun, who most may associate with River City Ransom, is a series that dates back to the 80s and 90s. This was an era where mainline sequels to spinoff sports titles came out at a steady stream even though most of them never hit the states. The once thriving franchise went dark in the late 90s, but there was a planned successor to River City Ransom called Kunio-kun: The Claw of Kowloon for PS1. Very little is known about the game and all that exists are some planning documents, which can be found on . Even though gamers never got their hands on this, the series is now alive and well once again with sequels like last year’sRiver City Girls carrying on the legacy.
1 The Lost
Before Irrational Games made it big on consoles via BioShock, they were working on The Lost for PS2 and the original Xbox. While it was not a first-person shooter, the general vibe definitely fit the team’s mold for what would become BioShock. Funnily enough, it was an adaption, loosely, on The Divine Comedy, which EA and Visceral used as a basis for Dante’s Inferno in 2010.
Anyway, work progressed for years in-between other projects, but the rights eventually fell into another company’s hands, FXLabs, who released the game in India under the guise of Agni: Queen of Darkness. , naturally, has a lot of screenshots and videos from multiple iterations of the project. Also, for comparison, here is a for Agni’s release.