Death Cargo

Overview

Death Cargo was a fighting game released in 2014 by multimedia company Necrostorm. It has a horror/sci-fi setting and specialized in massively gory finishing moves known as "Death Rips".

Story

Xonader is a planet devoted to manufacturing "thinking weapons". Semi-contentious biological creatures with extraordinary abilities. Death Cargos are the ships that deliver said creatures to their destination. On December 12th, 2067, a Death cargo carried out an emergency landing on Earth due to a failure in the main engine. During the crash landing weapons were ejected out of the ship and propelled towards different places on the planet. Strangely the commander of the ship went silent during the landing as if he had perished but his vital signs confirmed that he was still alive. So a new Commander has been sent to retrieve the weapons and find out what happened to the commander. The only problem is that the weapons were activated during the crash...

Gameplay

A battle consists of one round. Fighting system includes grabs, combos, special moves, ex-moves, ultra moves and special "thinking weapon" moves. The game utilizes two special bars: one for ex-moves and one for "thinking" moves. The more filled up the bar is, the more powerful the move. Each character has 2 finishing moves called Deathrips that if executed correctly will give you a bonus in the next fight.

Release

After numerous delays, Death Cargo was reported to have been ready to ship out in early 2014 (February/March, by most reports). No physical copies of the game had been reported to have been received by May of that year, and by an estimation of Necrostorm's own, circa 6000 preorders had been made for this version of the game and only 20 copies had been shipped out by May. Necrostorm maintains that eventually all ordered copies were received.

Digital versions of the game were also apparently not released, until this fervor caught wind and a number of people received their copies in late May. However, this was simply a .RAR file with an .EXE that would generate a code to be sent to Necrostorm via email, which would then tell the consumer that they would receive the game file after 48 hours. Many reported that they never received their file.

These factors, coupled with the fact that it is alleged that Necrostorm were banning anyone who complained or asked about their copy and adding them to a blacklist where these banned users couldn't even request to purchase a copy of the game, made many wonder if the entire operation was an elaborate scam. Several news sites and message boards including Kotaku, NeoGAF, and Shoryuken.com, told tales of customers who had experienced all of the above and even worse, with some stating that they had been threatened with legal action for the act of disparaging the project or company.

Necrostorm has since announced a revised edition of the game, retitled "Gorebreaker", that they promise is everything Death Cargo should have been. They also indicated that all owners of Death Cargo would receive Gorebreaker as a free upgrade. Unfortunately, the last update of this project on their website was in mid-2016. A series of films based on Death Cargo also began releasing in 2015, with the title "The Mildew from Planet Xonader".