Get Your Stinking Paws On The PLANET OF THE APES: LAST FRONTIER Trailer

An announcement trailer for the first modern video game based on Planet of the Apes dropped yesterday, surprising just about everyone. Apes isn’t exactly the most action-packed - or even the most popular - franchise right now, so a video game release was the last thing I, for one, expected. Check it out:

Set between Dawn of and War for the Planet of the Apes, the game has players taking roles on both sides of the human-ape conflict at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It doesn’t appear to concern Caesar directly, focusing instead on a different group of apes, but the winter-time survival story certainly looks a lot like the recent trilogy - right down to the abundance of sign language. Here's six minutes of gameplay, courtesy of IGN:

Looks very similar, gameplay-wise, to games like Until Dawn and Heavy Rain - playable movies, more or less, that invite players to guide the action rather than directly control it. Honestly, that's exactly what I want from a game based on these Apes films: a narrative- and character-heavy experience without too much intrusion by gamey mechanics. Can you imagine how cheap climbing map towers or pressing Y to counter would feel in Planet of the Apes? Especially in the hugely empathetic reboot universe?

Then again, a more goofy, action-driven Apes game detached from the series’ current incarnation could also be fun. But that’s for another time. Maybe we’ll get that out of the impending board game release.

Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier is out this fall from Fox's new interactive division FoxNext, developed by Andy Serkis’ performance capture studio The Imaginarium and brand-new narrative game studio Imaginati. It'd better be pretty damn imaginative, then.