As a spiritual successor to the Panzer Dragoon series, which also sees series composer Saori Kobayashi (who worked on Saga and Orta) return, the game will feature the same homing projectile shooting as the previous games and run on Unreal Engine 3. Only this time, the player will use his hands to lock on to targets. With six types of dragons, tons of skills and three player co-op, the game sounds like it will have a lot more meat to it it than Orta did.

Which is interesting, since Orta was exclusive to the first Xbox. We hadn’t heard a peep from the developer since. And now this. Well played Microsoft. Well played.

Screenshots:

Crimson Dragon is being developed by Groundign, Inc. and Land Ho! Co. Ltd. with Microsot Games Studio publishing the title. Thanks to the involvement of Yukio Futatsugi, who was the director of the first three Panzer Dragoon games, and composer Saori Kobayashi, who co-scored Panzer Dragoon Saga and Orta, it is often viewed as the next game in vaunted series (much like Bioshock is seen as a sort-of sequel to System Shock).

As of now, the rail shooter has no definite release date in Japan or North America, but it look like it’ll hit somewhere this year. The last title, Panzer Dragoon Orta, released almost 9 years ago in North America for the original Xbox.

Source: Kotaku