Announced in October of 2007, Airburst is an XBLA title being developed by Strange Flavour in partnership with publisher Freeverse Software.

You may remember Freeverse from some of the previous XBLA titles they worked on with Strange Flavour (Marathon: Durandal, Spyglass Board Games & Totemball), and while they have proven they are more than competant, Airburst certainly shines through as their best looking title yet.

I’ve always said it’s great to see new ideas come to arcade instead of just boring re-hashes of ancient games and Airburst looks like a lot of fun. The game is top-down with your character sitting on a pile of floating balloons, there is a spiky ball that pops your balloons bouncing around the screen and you rotate the equivalent of a small shield around your character that bounces the spiky ball harmlessly away.

You can customize your character to some degree (which is slightly unnecessary but still greatly appreciated) with the ability to add textures, paint things onto the character and add accessories. It adds a bit of fun and personality, and it looks like you can alter the position and rotation to the nth degree.

They have taken the time to incorporate fully 3d moving backgrounds (or more appropriately floorgrounds) when they could have taken the boring route of a static texture and might I add they look great, while they only show two different floorgrounds/stages in the trailer I’m told more are being added all the time (and old ones are being removed) so it will be interesting to see how many we get in the final title.

There’s a raft of different game types, from the standard 4 players trying to knock each other out, to a static puzzler and even “footie” (soccer), so it looks like there will be plenty of different game types to keep you interested.

We’ve got the first trailer embedded below so you can check it out for yourself, I’m definitely not a fan of the music (which I’m told is called “Pop Pop Pop” by Abdoujaparov, the offical theme song for Airburst), but your thoughts may differ.

To keep up to date with all the latest on Airburst stay glued to 360sync and check out the Strange Flavour Airburst developer diary.

You’ll find Airburst on the Freeverse website as well as the Strange Flavour website.