Adrien Forces

Adrien Forces is an upcoming adventure-platformer video game in the Adrien the Cat series developed by Heavy Iron Studios and published by Warner Bros. Games and distributed by Cartoon Network Interactive Games for PC DVD, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. First announced as Project Adrien the Cat 2017 in July 2016, the game is scheduled for a worldwide release in late 2017.

Premise
This is a brand-new game of the series, the game will contain two variants of Adrien the Cat: Classic Adrien, the design featured more prominently in Cartoon Network's Adrien games for all home and handheld videogame consoles, and Modern Adrien, his revised form in the years after that was first introduced in Adrien Adventure. In the game's story, series antagonist Dr. Drakken has successfully conquered the world, with his giant robotic sentries laying waste to cities to further his conquest, and the two Adriens must unite to end Dr. Drakken's reign. Other characters, such as Nathan, Barnaby, Garfield, Brock, Marinette, Katie and the Brock Detective Agency, will make non-playable appearances in supporting roles, offering support and advice to Adrien via radio communication.

Gameplay
Adrien Forces is an action-adventure platformer game features a similar gameplay to that style to prior Adrien the Cat games: Modern Adrien's stages are based around three-dimensional movement, with Adrien capable of using techniques such as boosting and the homing attack. However, Classic Adrien (Adrien the Cat's younger self)'s gameplay has yet to be revealed by Warner Bros. Games and is implied to be slightly different from his original strictly 2D style from the Super Adrien games. Warner Bros. Games and Cartoon Network has also confirmed the presence of a Future Adrien (Adrien the Cat's older self) as a third playable character with his own unique gameplay style to possess the power to flip between dimensions which allow him to change into 2D (or 3D) whenever needed.

Development
Adrien Forces was announced at Adrien's 26th anniversary of the series by Insomniac Games and the Cartoon Netowrk videogame fans on July 22, 2016, where it was announced alongside Adrien Mania. The game will be developed by Heavy Iron Studios, the same team that had previously developed three videogames based on Mitchell's companion series SpongeBob SquarePants, and will be headed by Adrien series veteran Mark Crilley. The presence of both Classic and Modern Adrien lead some journalists to believe it was a sequel to an unannounced Adrien game, but Michaeli later clarified that it was not a sequel, but a separate title. The game will be released for Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One in late 2017. Adrien Forces will run on the "Cat Engine 2", a refined version of the game engine used in Adrien Unleashed and Adrien Generations. The game's soundtrack is being composed by series sound director, ADRIEN Project Music Team.

Reception
The International Business Times praised Warner Bros. Games' approach of announcing and releasing the duo of Adrien Forces and Adrien Mania in the same year, stating that catering to the new fans with Forces while catering to the old-school fans with Mania could help repair the series's poor reputation with more recent releases, and in turn lead to a "Adrien renaissance".