Pop your bottles of Champagne, Grand Cru has now launched their long awaited title, Supernauts, in the Finnish app store, allowing Finns to finally build their own little worlds in something close to a Minecraft meets Clash of Clans dynamic. “The next Supercell” or “The next Rovio” comparisons have gotten tired after the million articles written by foreign press after Slush, but with the quality of the Grand Cru team, Helsinki is hoping on a third repeat success when the game is launched internationally.
When I say this game has been long awaited, here’s the background. We first wrote about the company back in May of 2011 when they received an initial investment from Lifeline Ventures, but their lips were sealed about anything they were up to. In March of 2012 a launch seemed imminent when they received $2 million from Idinvest Partners and announced Supernauts would be their first game title, but time went on and all we had was a teaser image. Then soon after that news got around that they hired Thorbjörn Warin from Wooga to manage their marketing, but despite hiring someone whose sole job is to tell other people about their game, not much news escaped their Kallio offices. Then, boom, late this past summer we hear they’ve raised a nice, round €8.5 million, implying a big marketing push is ahead of them.
Now that it’s here, the gameplay revolves around building up your Superhero’s own world, block by block, and by completing missions on earth where you use your block teleporting powers to solve puzzles to rescue citizens.
The world-building element can be compared somewhat to the Clash of Clans / Hay Day dynamic of building resource generators, and then waiting for blocks to be produced, which can of course be sped up with coins and gems. After you got all these basic blocks, you can turn them in other, more “fabulous” blocks, trade them to NPCs on the market, or just plop them anywhere you want to build up your world. Fabulousness is a key point to this game, each block has a certain fabulousness value, and to level up and expand your world you need to be building fabulous things with more resource intensive blocks.
There’s a social element to keep building as well, to show off and to see what your friends have built, and allowing you to leave messages or occasionally to place a small amount of blocks wherever you want in their world. Additionally you can rate the worlds of friends and strangers you come across, giving a local and international leaderboard of the cool worlds people have built.
I got my hands on the tester a few days ago and it’s been stealing a decent amount of time out of my day. I’m a big fan of the quirky Supernauts style, and I’m probably still in the intense honeymoon phase, but I imagine the game has plenty of hooks to keep people coming back, and spending money in-game.
That’s my description, but here’s the teaser video released by Grand Cru this morning, which I guess also sums up the game. Supernauts can be downloaded in the App Store, here.
