The team at Statera Studio previously showed their love for classic 2D fighting games with Pocket Bravery. Now they’re taking that expertise and throwing in some platform fighter inspiration for Shield Strike, a four-player brawler that’s currently eyeing a 2025 launch.
In a setup that will be familiar to anyone who has played a fighter like Super Smash Bros. or MultiVersus, Shield Strike puts players in two-dimensional arenas full of platforms and plenty of items to use and mayhem to cause. True to its title, the hook here has combatants using their shields as projectiles, and you can see a sample in Statera’s reveal trailer below.
Shield Strike currently has plans for eight playable characters, and up to four players can get in on the action in both versus and cooperative modes. There’s also a story mode that unravels more of what’s going on in this medieval fantasy world, complete with a bunch of enemies and five boss battles.
With a match-start countdown timer that ends in “MURDER,” Shield Strike aims to deliver the kind of fast-paced, frantic action fans of the sub-genre have come to expect. The shield mechanics certainly have my interest piqued, but what I really want to see are more of those obstacles and other means of disruption. I don’t fancy myself a competitive platform fighter player by any means. I play Smash for the chaos. If Shield Strike can harness that level of borderline frustrating unpredictability in its versus battles, count me in.
While we wait for a more concrete launch date, Shield Strike is currently in the works for PC and a Steam page is live for wishlisting.
