Action Vault: At the high concept level, what are your main goals with respect to the combat system and the kinds of play experience it's intended to provide?

Emmanuel Courosse: With fights, what we really wanted to do was to have them much longer than average. The gameplay mix we're aiming for is somewhere between Quake and Counter-Strike. I mean, we want stress and accuracy like in Counter-Strike, but we DON'T want a "one man, one bullet" balance. We also don't want to base all of the fights on the "I'm a god at headshots" way either.

We want to allow the player to fall back, hide, repair and reload, and to find new spots and strafes. Players must have time in each situation to evolve in several possible ways, for example, time for you and your enemies to re-organize. One of the key strategic elements of the game is the armor system. Because players can't get their health back during a mission, and can only repair their armor, panic can begin to set in when you're taking heavy damage