District 9 director Neill Blomkamp on the over-the-top, ultra-violent satire of Off the Grid

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Off the Grid is a lot.

Released in early access last month, the Gunzilla developed game is a high-fidelity shooter with a razor-sharp hook: The contestants trying to kill one another on the game’s constructed island have not only volunteered to participate in all the death, but also to have their limbs chopped off and replaced with interchangeable cybernetics.

In action, this means a player can quickly add and swap out skills—such as lighting-fast running, cloaking, goo-guns, and more—simply by grabbing limbs off the battlefield or from the recently killed (or delimbed).

They can also have those limbs popped off with a precise shot, leaving them limbless—or a limb down, but alive. There’s also jet packs, grappling hooks, and a map that at times feels almost as vertical as it is horizontal. And there’s the glimpses of Off the Grid’s compelling story told through a mashup of in-game and live-action interstitials.

The game’s visual design and overall aesthetic is heavily inspired by 2013 dystopian sci-fi action flick Elysium, thanks to the early and ongoing involvement of that movie’s writer and director Neill Blomkamp.

And then there is the NFT—lightly woven into the game’s extraction mechanics—which is designed to help players track the things they fought so hard to pull off the island.

All of this—the crazy backstory, the unique storytelling, the NFT, the mix of movement methods, and unique ways to power-up a character beyond simply the guns they carry—is secondary to achieving the sort of buttery-smooth movement and control necessary to make sure a shooter of any type can survive in a market that includes the likes of Call of Duty, Battlefield, Apex Legends, PUBG, Fortnite, and so many more.

And that’s a good thing, at least from Blomkamp’s point of view. The director, who is currently spending a lot of his time exploring storytelling in a genre not typically known for it, took a moment recently to chat about his unusual involvement in the game, why he’s so interested in video games in general, and what he hopes to achieve with this game in particular.

Continue reading this story on Epic Games Store, where it ran on Nov. 13, 2024.