Gemini: Heroes Reborn is part of a 10-year journey to creating the ultimate superhero game

Above: Heroes Reborn: Enigma’s Dahlia has powers that are similar to Cassandra’s.

Image Credit: Giancarlo Valdes/GamesBeat

Scratching that superhero itch

Gemini seems promising. My favorite power was Cassandra’s Time Jump, which lets her time-travel to 2008 or 2014 (along with any objects she might be carrying) at will. This opens up some fun ways for dealing with enemies. At one point, I grabbed a soldier with telekinesis, time-jumped to the past, dropped him off, and then went back to the present.

I used Time Scout — it opens a window into the time period you’re not currently in — to watch my confused captive look for me. He doesn’t know that I’ve trapped him there forever.

The do-what-you-want gameplay is reminiscent of Phosphor’s initial goals for Hero and Project Awakened. Sineni told me that while making the telekinesis power (Cassandra can lift and throw objects or people with her mind), the team felt like it was also revisiting what it started with the 2004 Midway game Psi-Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy.

“To do that kind of giant, create-a-player and mix-and-match [of powers] was beyond the scope of the Heroes project,” said Sineni. “We were like, ‘Well, what could we do that we actually couldn’t have done in those games? What would be something really neat?’ Some of the time powers came out of that. Time powers are kind of hard to control in a huge [world] — anyone can do whatever they want anywhere. But in this case, because it’s a more story-driven thing, we could do some of these powers we’ve always wanted to explore.”

Parts of Project Awakened has been trickling down to Phosphor’s other games. Nether, a multiplayer survival game, takes place in a ruined city, an urban environment that’s only slightly different from the city envisioned for Project Awakened. Nether also has a wing glider that lets you briefly fly through the world, which is kind of like the flying mechanics Phosphor was planning for the superhero game.

“The thing for us is that we still have never fully scratched this itch,” said Sineni. “We’ve been working on this [idea] since 2006, and we never fully — we touch around it. … There are parts of the Hero idea in Nether, and there are definitely a lot of parts of it in the Heroes games. We’re antsy to completely tie those together.”

Above: In Gemini, you’ll cross paths with Dahlia.

Image Credit: Imperative Entertainment

Publishers continue to approach Phosphor Games about making Project Awakened a reality. They hold discussions every year at industry events like the DICE Summit and the Electronic Entertainment Expo tradeshow. But it still hasn’t been made.

“We tend to think where [Project Awakened] might fit best in today’s market. It may not exist in that name and that exact same time period of the present day,” said Sineni. “But I think there’s a lot of other ways to do it. … Especially when you look at all the other multiplayer-type games people are doing. There’s a really strong multiplayer game in that concept, and I think it just needs the right presentation to really get publishers excited about it.”