Legendary comic book creator Stan Lee unveiled a new iOS project this weekend at Comikaze, a Los Angeles-based comic convention of which Lee is part owner. The game is called Verticus and is being developed by Moonshark, with Stan Lee himself providing his voice and likeness as the mission commander in the game.
Lee also created the main character, named Verticus, who unsurprisingly has some very superhero-like qualities and is the last hope for saving the planet from certain doom. It’s a story we’ve all heard before, and Stan Lee is one of the best at telling it.
Verticus’s power lies in his special heat-resistant suit that allows him to fall through the atmosphere. He’ll plummet through the air, past buildings and into the ground, all the way to the Earth’s core and back out the other side of the planet where the gravity catches him and sets him up for another slingshot back through. You can see a bit of this in the first trailer for Verticus.
It’s this back-and-forth trip through the Earth that sets the game up as “an infinite faller” as Moonshark’s Matt Kozlov describes it. He also likens the gameplay to Temple Run, which at this point, after basically becoming its own genre after seeing so many derivatives released, is really unsurprising.
As we’ve seen, though, some of these Temple Run-like games have offered their own spin on the formula, and carved out their own niche of fans. With Stan Lee having such a heavy hand in the creation of Verticus (Kozlov says Lee’s “DNA is really infused in the game”) I have high hopes. We’ll see when Verticus launches sometime in October.
