It’s hard to believe that after nearly four long years, the opportunity to show off Full Metal Furies is fast approaching. It all started with the naïve idea that after making our first game, Rogue Legacy, the next one would be smooth sailing. Countless delays later, and a development cycle that lasted two years longer than planned, we finally have a launch date to announce – Full Metal Furies will be released on January 17, 2018 for Xbox One and Windows 10.

We fell just short of our promise to release in 2017, but we hope you’ll forgive us the time needed to ensure we did not compromise on the experience we wanted players to enjoy.

FMF holds a special place in our hearts because its beginnings stem back more than 10 years ago, before our company, Cellar Door Games, even existed. Being ’80s babies, we grew up in the arcades with brawlers like Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Arcade. It was truly the golden age of brawlers and beat-em-ups, but since then the genre has struggled to reach contemporary audiences. It was heartbreaking to see these types of games stagnate, so we’ve known for a long time that we wanted to do something about it.

Fortunately, we weren’t the only ones who felt this way. Games before us, like Castle Crashers, was evidence of what we believed all along: the beat-em-up wasn’t dead, it just needed some love. And while a number of brawlers have come out since, we believe old-school nostalgia can only take you so far. Our goal from the start has always been to help modernize the brawler genre and bring it to a younger generation of players. We’ve said it in interviews and we’ve pushed it into our marketing assets, but we’ve never properly explained what that means. That’s because it’s not a simple explanation.

For Full Metal Furies, we tried to tackle everything we thought was a problem. From the big ticket items like adding a proper story and implementing deeper combat systems, to the more minute issues such as standing at the edge of the screen and just punching enemies off-camera.

It is a massive laundry list of changes, big and small, and while we could bullet-point every single thing that we feel makes FMF special, who’d read it? (By the way, if you want a list, let us know and we’ll totally give it to you).

Brawlers lived in a time where you paid for every minute you wanted to play. You could get away with repetition, button mashing, and simple game mechanics because people rarely beat the arcade games they started. But gone are the days of two button control schemes. Contemporary video games have to be deeper, longer, and more complex than ever before. And we believe FMF is up to the challenge. Full Metal Furies is more than the sum of its parts, and we hope you’ll give us the chance to prove it this January.

Still here? Well, if you are actually interested in the nitty-gritty of the game, we’re posting comics and videos explaining the design every other day of the week on our social media channels. You can also catch up here: fullmetalfuries.com