Steel Circus mixes Mario Strikers and pinball with Speedball

Steel Circus is Speedball-esque multiplayer sports title from Austrian developer Iron Mountain Interactive and Chinese publisher Oasis Games, we caught up with them during GDC to try the game and learn more about it.

"It's a future sports game," said game director Hellmut Hutterer. "But it's really a game about teamplay. It's about positioning, split-second decision making and playing together well as a team utilising the different abilities of the champions, the characters in the game."

Speaking of the origins of the game and inspirations, Hutterer had this to say:

"I think our first prototypes where first-person and third-person and when it was clear that we wanted to put a strong emphasis on teamplay that's how we ended up with third-person because that just worked a lot better. But we looked again at those games [Speedball], but I haven't played it in ages, but we looked at videos, but there's also a bit of Mario Strikers in there and a bit of elements of like pinball with those bumpers on the playfield."

Steel Circus is currently in alpha testing, and will be released via Steam Early Access in the next couple of months.