This upcoming third-person shooter looks like a mash-up of every game in the genre that dropped in the last decade, although the jury is still out as to whether that’s a good or a bad sign.
If you took the third-person combat of Days Gone, added in a gameplay loop straight out of The Division, and then gave it a glossy, Cyberpunk 2077-esque paintjob, you’d probably end up with something that looked a lot like Cinder City.
Or, y’know, Crackdown 3, except you’re dressed as the dude from Crysis 2.
Announced way back in 2024, when it was previously known as LLL, Cinder City is an “MMO tactical shooter” from developer BigFire Games and publisher NCSOFT that’s coming to PCs and consoles in the first half of 2026.
A lot of folks online seem quietly hyped for this one, especially following the gameplay demo footage that dropped in August, but there’s something oddly underwhelming about it that I can’t quite wrap my head around.
It certainly looks pretty, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a strange sort of made-by-committee feeling to a lot of the gameplay I’ve seen so far. The animations and the designs just look like they’ve been copy-pasted from several different sources, which just gives me the feeling that I’ve already played it before.
That isn’t to say that the devs are directly ripping assets from other games, but rather that the whole thing seems super uninspired.
Funnily enough, GAMINGbible’s own Sam Cawley didn’t seem too impressed with his hands-on experience with the game last month either, stating that “Cinder City does feel like your usual run-of-the-mill futuristic army shooter but I’m at least open to giving it another go when the game releases in 2026”.
Speaking of, the release date seems a little vague for the time being. NCSOFT stated that it’s set to launch in the first half of 2026 for both “consoles and PC”, but didn’t reveal an exact release date, or the exact consoles it will be dropping on.
I’d wager they’re keeping their cards close to their chest for now, so that the game doesn’t potentially clash with Grand Theft Auto VI when it releases in May 2026 next year.
Hopefully the devs give us a bit more reason to get excited about this one before then however, because I can’t help but feel apathetic towards Cinder City for the time being.
