Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier — hands-on with a new kind of movie-like game

Movie-like games have gotten a bad rap, since they tend to be bad about imitating movies and equally bad with robbing games of their interactivity. But Andy Serkis’ digital effects studio, The Imaginarium Studios, is taking a shot at it with a very different kind of game, Planet of the Apes: Last Frontier. I’ve seen a preview of it, and it looks like it could be a great new form of narrative storytelling in games.

Serkis’ performance capture studio can take acting performances and combine them with digital effects to create lifelike characters, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings and Caesar in the Planet of the Apes movies. Serkis is using the same technology to create awesome realistic ape and human characters in the game, which is being built by Serkis’ The Imaginati game studio.