Riposte Games & Co, who most recently released the multiplayer strategy game Mini Guns (Free) towards the end of last summer but have also worked on such titles as Shop Heroes (Free), Card Monsters (Free), and the popular Flash title Swords & Potions; and Dallas-based Furnace Games, who previously worked with Zynga on Castleville back in the day and more recently with Boss Fight Entertainment on Dungeon Boss (Free); today announced a new partnership that will see Riposte publishing the next two titles from Furnace. The first of these games is called Dungeon Stars, and it’s a side-scrolling hack ‘n slash action RPG with a really cool looking art style and excellent character animations. Check out this recent teaser for Dungeon Stars.

I love the way this game looks and how the characters are animated. So often in games like these you’ll get really generic body animations and expressionless faces, but in Dungeon Stars it’s like each little character is from a cartoon. There’s also a really neat effect produced with the 2D characters marching through 3D environments with real-time shadow effects. Of course, games can look great all day long and that won’t matter if they’re not fun. In the case of Dungeon Stars, given the developers’ previous releases, I’m pretty sure this will be your typical free to play collect-and-upgrade-a-thon, but if you’re among the many people who are into those games, then this looks like it’ll be a great one. No release date beyond “2018" just yet but we’ll keep our eye on Dungeon Stars and bring you any progress updates as they happen.