For the past eight years, Team Kanohi has been at work creating the Bionicle video game of our dreams. That project has taken many shapes during that time, from Masks of Power: Legacy, to Trials of the Great Spirit, and ultimately, to BIONICLE: Masks of Power as you see it today.
We’ve been transparent about the hardships our team has faced over the past year as we’ve worked to release the first look at BIONICLE: Masks of Power: the FREE THE BAND demo. After many years of hard work, our team was in the final stages of bugfixing and polishing for the demo’s release. We had planned to shadowdrop the demo on August 10th, 2025.
Unfortunately, it seems that will no longer happen. The LEGO Group has asked our team to shut down our project in its entirety, and remove BIONICLE: Masks of Power from the public eye.
Although we’re unable to release the demo, we wanted to share a complete video walkthrough of the entire demo in its current state. Please keep in mind that the demo still had 3 months of polish to undergo before launch, meaning that the footage contains many known issues. However, we are still incredibly proud of what our team has accomplished, and wanted to take this last chance to share it with all of you.
Why are you being shut down now?
BIONICLE: Masks of Power has been in development for over eight years. During that entire time, we’ve made an effort to ensure our project was in good standing with the LEGO Group, carefully following the LEGO Group’s Fair Play guidelines. We have never charged our fans a single cent for the game’s development, and have put disclaimers that clearly label our project as fan-made on our website, Steam page, and every trailer for the game. The LEGO Group has even publicly endorsed similar fan-made games, such as Bionicle: Quest for Mata Nui on their official Bits N’ Bricks Podcast.
Unfortunately, it seems like the LEGO Group’s stance on fan-created media has changed. While we can only speculate as to the exact reason why they have asked us to remove the game at this time, what we suspect is that our project was too easy to mistake for an official product. At the time of writing, searching “Bionicle game” on Google lists the Steam page for BIONICLE: Masks of Power within the first couple of links. An average person seeing our game for the first time could easily think that it was an official game at first glance. And no amount of disclaimers we could put up would be able to change that.
What’s next for Team Kanohi?
We’ve spent years building an incredibly passionate and talented team of developers. We’ve put untold amounts of time, effort, and love into creating this game, and we’re not about to let it all go to waste.
Our plan is to take everything we’ve learned through creating Masks of Power and use that knowledge and experience as the foundation of a brand-new, original game. Currently codenamed Project Rustbound, our team has already begun brainstorming concepts for a new, original world that we get the chance to build ourselves. We can’t wait to take everything that we’ve learned through working on this game and use it to make something entirely our own.
And with this drastic new undertaking for our team, we’ll of course need a new name. We’re proud to announce that Team Kanohi is now Unmasked Games, an independent game studio.
From the bottom of our hearts, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported us over the long journey to get where we are today. We’ve grown from just a couple of Bionicle fans trying to make the type of game we wished we had as kids into a fully-fledged independent game studio. And the only reason we’ve been able to grow this much is through all of your support and love. Thank you.
This has been heartbreaking news for our entire team, but we’re also incredibly excited about what the future has in store, and for what we’ll get the chance to create next. We hope that you’re all just as excited as we are.
For the final time…
May the Great Spirit guide you.
2024 - Year in Review
2024 sucked.
As we mentioned in our announcement earlier this year, this year has been an unprecedentedly difficult one for our team. We’ve been struck with many unexpected hardships that have hindered our ability to progress with development. This has been a disappointing year for our development team, and we understand that it’s been a disappointing one for our fans as well.
In spite of this, we wanted to take some time to reflect on everything that we were able to accomplish in 2024. In spite of everything we faced this year, we put out a lot of content that we’re very proud of. We also have a lot of other news related to BIONICLE: Masks of Power that you may have missed over the past year. We’ve compiled all of these accomplishments and announcements into one place so that you can see everything that Team Kanohi was able to achieve in 2024.
Up first are our soundtrack releases. We began sharing some music from BIONICLE: Masks of Power late last year, and this continued into 2024! Some of these songs are ones that you can expect to hear in the FREE THE BAND demo, while others have been made for areas that will be in the full game! We released 7 songs in total, all of which can be found on our YouTube channel! Alongside these soundtrack releases, we also released a video recapping the world and story of Bionicle. “The Story so Far” Is meant to bring everyone who’s interested in BIONICLE: Masks of Power up to speed on what the world of Bionicle has to offer, be they hardcore fans of the series or just people who thought the toys looked cool as a kid. This video brings the world of Bionicle to life with beautiful illustrations, all of which can be found on the media page of our website! Something else we’d like to highlight in this post are interviews that some of our team members were able to be a part of this year! We had the chance to give two different interviews about the game on the shows Mind Goblins and DEV. LIFE! We loved these chances to talk more about the game and share some behind-the-scenes secrets at what the game’s development has looked like. You can find the VODs from both of these live-streamed interviews above!
Lastly, we’ve also begun the process of translating the Legacy version of Masks of Power into other languages! For those of you who may not be familiar, Masks of Power: Legacy is the original iteration of BIONICLE: Masks of Power, which was released in 2021. And this year, we’ve begun a community-driven effort to translate the game. While our team has been focusing on development of the FREE THE BAND demo, we’ve organized a way for you, the fans, to help translate Masks of Power: Legacy into as many different languages as possible! If you want to help in our translation efforts, then you can join our Discord server, where you can find more information in the #legacy_translation channel.
That covers all of our major announcements from 2024. As we move into 2025, we understand that after everything that our team has been through in the past year, many of our fans have been feeling uncertain about the game’s future. But rest assured, the FREE THE BAND demo will be released. The question of when it will be released is ultimately determined by real-life issues that are completely outside of our control. To try and predict a release window at this time would be disingenuous, which is why we do not currently have a planned release window for the demo.
We would like to extend a huge thank you to all of our fans who have supported us this year. Truly, we would not be able to continue developing this game were it not for your heartfelt support and kind words. You’ve helped encourage us to continue pushing through development in spite of all of the misfortune we’ve faced this year, and we hope that you’ll continue to encourage and support us as we head into 2025.
Thank you for reading, and may the Great Spirit guide you.
FREE THE BAND Demo development update
Earlier this year, we committed to releasing the much-anticipated FREE THE BAND Demo for BIONICLE: Masks of Power.
We’re writing today to announce a shift in paradigm. Up to this point, we’ve been upholding the veneer of a full-time professional development team. Although this project is unpaid, many among us do this for a living, and we believe that professionalism shows in the results you’ve seen and have yet to see.
Ultimately, however, this project is not keeping our lights on, and we’re shifting gears a little in order to be more transparent about our situation. We’ve said before that 2024 has been a difficult year; but this doesn’t really capture the sheer magnitude of ill fortune that’s befallen our team.
Many of our core staff have been near homelessness this year; several have been impacted by deaths; medical issues have arisen for some, severely impacting their productivity; and just about everyone working full-time in game development has been laid off.
None of these misfortunes are related; it’s truly just been a cacophony of awful luck. We cannot release a polished product in 2024 and stay sane. It’s not fair to our team, but it’s also not fair to our fans to not communicate the reality of where we’re at.
Thus, we’re taking a step back. It is unlikely that we will release the FREE THE BAND demo in 2024, but more broadly, we aren’t going to commit to any release period at this time.
We'd also like to share a short, unedited clip of gameplay from the FREE THE BAND demo. As the game is still in development, everything shown in this video is still very WIP, with a number of visible bugs.
We understand that this is disappointing news, but please bear with us; we all want to put BMOP in your hands as soon as we can. Great Spirit willing, that will happen!
Kind regards, The Team Kanohi development team
BIONICLE: Masks of Power - The Story So Far
Want a quick refresher on what the world of Bionicle has to offer? Our latest video recounts the Legend of the mighty Toa in preparation for legends yet to be told in BIONICLE: Masks of Power!
With BIONICLE: Masks of Power reaching both hardcore fans of the theme and casual fans who may be rediscovering Bionicle for the first time since childhood, we wanted to make sure that our entire audience was up-to-speed with what you can expect to find on the shores of Mata Nui. This video was created to help bridge that gap in preparation for the FREE THE BAND Demo, which is set to launch later this year! If you’re interested in downloading high-quality versions of the illustrations featured in this video, you can find all of them on the media page of our website.
We hope you’re continuing to look forward to the FREE THE BAND Demo, and thank you for your continued support and understanding as we progress with development.
Thank you for reading, and may the Great Spirit guide you.
FREE THE BAND Demo Update
The FREE THE BAND demo for BIONICLE: Masks of Power will now be released on Steam in Late 2024.
We understand that this isn't fun news, but the nature of fan projects such as this make release dates incredibly difficult to predict. BIONICLE: Masks of Power is being made by an entirely volunteer team of developers in our spare time, which unfortunately means that development must take a backseat to our actual lives.
This delay is not due to any kind of major problems or issues arising during development, but rather unpredictable life events outside of the project which unfolded for key team members. We humbly ask for your understanding in these matters.
We look forward to sharing more about BIONICLE: Masks of Power as soon as we can. In the meantime, we thank you for your continued patience, and especially the generous feedback we've received throughout this entire process. It genuinely makes a difference to us!
2023 - Year in Review
With 2023 behind us, it’s time once again for our annual Year in Review post. We’ll be reviewing all of the major accomplishments that Team Kanohi has made in 2023 so that you can stay up-to-date on any updates or announcements you may have missed.
By far our biggest accomplishment of the year was the release of our Demo Trailer back in August, where we shared an exciting new look at the upcoming FREE THE BAND demo for BIONICLE: Masks of Power. In addition to showing off some of the different environments and challenges you’ll face in the demo, this trailer featured the brand new song, As Above, So Below, which was produced as a collaboration between Essenger, one of our composers, and Cryoshell, the band behind many of Bionicle’s most iconic music tracks!
The demo trailer is currently our most successful trailer yet, currently sitting at over half a million views! We’d like to thank everybody who’s shared the trailer with others, or even those who have seen it and are excited to play the demo when it launches early next year. If you’re interested in more information about the Demo Trailer, you can check out our full blog post covering it here!
Another large accomplishment this year was the launch of our TikTok page, which has quickly become our largest social media platform, with some of our posts passing 1 million views within our first month! Thank you to everyone who’s helped to promote us on this new platform, and we hope that all of the new fans learning about Masks of Power are just as excited as we are for the game!
Recently, we’ve begun sharing some excerpts of music on our YouTube channel! We’re planning on releasing new music every month leading up to the release of the FREE THE BAND demo. So far, we’ve released two different music tracks: “Songs of the Lily Pads”, a track that you’ll hear in the seaside village of Ga-Koro, and “Rama-Swarm Rumble,” a combat track to accompany the hostile swarms of Nui-Rama in the jungles of Le-Wahi! We hope you’re looking forward to hearing more music from the game in the coming months.
That covers all of our major accomplishments in 2023, but what can you expect to see from us in 2024? Our biggest goal is, of course, the release of the FREE THE BAND demo. We’re still on track to release the demo in the early months of 2024, so please stay tuned to all of our social media channels for news and updates regarding the demo. You can also look forward to monthly music releases on our YouTube channel leading up to its release, so you’ll have something to listen to as we work on putting the finishing touches on the demo. 2024 is shaping to be a very eventful year for us, and we hope you’re just as excited for it as we are.
2023 has been a major year for us in terms of growth, with our demo trailer reaching a wider audience than ever before. We know that you’re all looking forward to the FREE THE BAND demo, and we can’t wait until it’s ready to share with you! We’d like to extend our thanks to everyone who’s supported us in the past year, and hope that you’ll continue to support Team Kanohi and BIONICLE: Masks of Power in the years to come.
Thank you for reading, and may the Great Spirit guide you.
BIONICLE: Masks of Power Demo Trailer
The demo for BIONICLE: Masks of Power is something that has been in the works here at Team Kanohi for a very long time. Today, we’re excited to finally be able to share more information about that demo, including when you’ll be able to play it for yourself!
We’re happy to announce that the FREE THE BAND demo for BIONICLE: Masks of Power will be releasing in early 2024 on Steam! This demo will see players taking control of Lewa, Toa of Air, as he explores the jungles of Le-Wahi in order to save the members of a certain beloved band. The trailer gives a small taste of some of the different environments, enemies, and challenges you’ll find in the demo, and we hope you’re looking forward to fully experiencing it for yourself early next year!
While the demo will be primarily focused on Lewa and the Le-Wahi region of the game, the trailer also shows a small look at the other five Toa: Tahu, Gali, Kopaka, Pohatu, and Onua, who will all be playable in the full version of the game. We want to make sure that each Toa has a distinct feel that sets them apart from the others on their team. The agile, backflipping Lewa will have a very different playstyle than the more methodical and powerful Onua. A lot of work has been put into giving each Toa unique animations and playstyles, and we’re excited to share more of what makes each one unique in the future.
Speaking of playstyles, we’d also like to briefly highlight the many small improvements that have been made over the past year. We’ve taken a lot of the fan feedback we received from last year’s Gameplay Preview into account, and have been continuously improving the combat of Masks of Power. since its release. Combat feels a lot faster and more responsive, with more tangible feedback given to attacks when they land. We feel that the combat is a dramatic improvement over the state it was in one year ago, and can’t wait for you to get a chance to experience it for yourself!
Finally, and perhaps the most exciting of all, our trailer is able to feature a brand new song from Cryoshell, the band behind many of Bionicle’s most iconic songs! Their new song, As Above, So Below, was produced in collaboration with Essenger (who also happens to be a sound designer for Team Kanohi, and has helped arrange for this song to appear in our trailer the same day it releases!). This is incredibly exciting for all of us at Team Kanohi, and we’d like to thank Cryoshell and Essenger very much for allowing this to happen. You can listen to As Above, So Below here!
We’re incredibly excited about the future of Masks of Power, and hope that you’re just as excited to FREE THE BAND when our demo releases early next year! In the meantime, you can stay up to date with everything we’re working on by visiting out website at masksofpower.com, or by following us on any of our social media channels.
Thank you for reading, and may the Great Spirit guide you.
2022 - Year in Review
With 2022 coming to a close, it’s time for our annual Year in Review post. Each year, we take a look back at everything we as a team have accomplished. If you’ve missed any of our major announcements, or just want a refresher on what’s been going on at Team Kanohi, then this is the perfect place to get caught up.
The first major event of the year came in April. On April first, to be specific. This year for April Fool’s, we released an entirely new game: BIONICLE: Kapura Adventures, developed by OniFox. Using the assets and world of Masks of Power: Legacy, Kapura Adventures features the absolutely riveting gameplay of walking very slowly around the entire island of Mata Nui. With plenty of easter eggs scattered around the island, and a number of unique cosmetics to unlock, Kapura Adventures is the perfect game for people who like clicking two buttons over and over again for two and a half hours straight. There’s still one more update planned for Kapura Adventures that will add in a few extra cosmetics as well as a hard mode to the game. If you want to keep up-to-date on Kapura Adventures, updates about the game’s development will be made on our Discord server. Next, we would like to thank everyone who was able to come visit us at Brickworld Chicago this year! Two of our developers were able to attend this year’s Brickworld Lego Convention, bringing with them a playable demo for BIONICLE: Masks of Power. Attendees of the convention got to experience some of Masks of Power’s gameplay firsthand, and we loved both meeting with fans of our game, and introducing Masks of Power to new fans as well. We’d definitely like to do more in-person events like these in the future, so be sure to keep an eye on our social media for future announcements of when you could have a chance to play Masks of Power for yourself.
We’d also like to mention another Bionicle game which Team Kanohi had a hand in—Kolhii Champions. Kolhii Champions is a fan-made Bionicle game featuring online multiplayer, and we’ve been sharing some of our development resources with them to help make Kolhii Champions the best game it can be. This year marked a very important milestone for Kolhii Champions, as the game was released in early access on Steam earlier this year! If you want to play Kolhii Champions for yourself, you can download the game for free on Steam.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1799950/Kolhii_ChampionsAU/ But by far our biggest announcement of the year was our Gameplay Trailer, giving people the first look at what the gameplay of Masks of Power is like. While focusing primarily on combat, the trailer also highlighted the unique type of voice acting we’re using, as well as revealing that Masks of Power is being built in Unreal Engine 5. If you’re interested in a more in-depth dive into what this trailer revealed, you can check out our blog post covering the trailer here. Alongside this trailer, we also released the Team Kanohi Parts Pack, a collection of every single 3D modeled Bionicle piece that we created for use in BIONICLE: Masks of Power. Our modeling team has put in an incredible amount of work to ensure that all of the pieces that appear in Masks of Power are both accurate to the original parts and optimized for in-engine use. We wanted to share this hard work with the Bionicle community by making all of these models accessible to anyone who wants to use them. Already, we’ve seen some incredible uses of these parts from the community, and we hope that people will continue to use them for years to come. You can find a link to the Parts Pack in the Downloads section of our website. With that, we’ve covered all of our major accomplishments we made in 2022. But, as is tradition with our year in review posts, we’d like to give a little bit of a hint as to what we’re working on, and what you can expect to see from us in 2023. Currently, much of our development is being focused towards the demo for Masks of Power that we’ve been working on. And while we can’t confirm any release date, we can tell you that we’ve been making quite a lot of progress on the demo, and we hope to share more about it with you soon.
That concludes our 2022 year in review. We’ve achieved quite a lot this year, and are incredibly excited for what we’ll achieve in the year to come.
Thank you for reading, and may the Great Spirit guide you.
BIONICLE: Masks of Power Gameplay Preview
It’s been one year since we released the first teaser trailer for BIONICLE: Masks of Power. Since then, we at Team Kanohi have been very hard at work behind the scenes, and have been eager to be able to show off even more of the game. Today, we’re proud to release our combat gameplay reveal, giving you the first ever look at the combat and gameplay of BIONICLE: Masks of Power. In addition to this exciting reveal, we’re also releasing the Team Kanohi Parts Pack, a collection of all of the 3D models of Bionicle parts we’ve created or modified for use in BIONICLE: Masks of Power. We have a lot of very exciting things to show off today, so let’s get started with the combat gameplay reveal.
Firstly, we’re very happy to announce that BIONICLE: Masks of Power is being developed in Unreal Engine 5! We’re very excited to be able to take advantage of the new features that UE5 has to offer in BIONICLE: Masks of Power.
There are four gameplay pillars that we try to center our game design around: Combat, Exploration, Platforming, and Puzzle Solving. This video focuses primarily on the Combat gameplay pillar. Combat in BIONICLE: Masks of Power is heavily inspired by games like Nier: Automata, Monster Hunter, and The Legend of Zelda, while being its own unique BIONICLE-flavored combat experience.
There are two unique melee attack combos you can perform as each Toa: light attacks and heavy attacks. Variations of these attacks appear during different movement states, and can be chained together to deliver consistent damage to foes. It has been a steady progression from the combat in our Legacy version, to the prototype design in Trials of the Great Spirit, to where we are today!
In addition to your standard light and heavy combos, there are also powerful elemental attacks that each Toa can use. These elemental attacks also have their own variations, so be sure to experiment with each character’s abilities! In the combat reveal, you can see some of Lewa’s elemental attacks being used: ranged elemental attacks and an elemental dash attack. There will be completely unique and varied elemental attacks for all six Toa.
We’d also like to draw attention to the UI shown off in the combat reveal, beginning with the HUD. That isn’t just a 2D image that’s placed in the top left corner of the screen: it is a 3D model that’s rendered in-engine along with the rest of the game. What this means is that the health bar will dynamically interact with the lighting of the world around you. As you move the camera or go into darker areas, the lighting on your health bar will react accordingly, providing a deeper level of detail as you explore Mata Nui. The Mask Wheel is also rendered in real-time, and will even rotate as you select different masks!
We wanted the UI/UX for Masks of Power to feel cool, creative, and to overall aim for the same design goals as the original designers of the franchise. Interactivity and diegetic interfaces are a big part of the original 2001 marketing campaign, and it's rooted in the DNA of BIONICLE. Hopefully you agree that we reached the same design goals, and we're eager to share more of the creative UI experiences we have in store for you!
Next, we’d like to highlight one specific aspect of the dialogue shown at the beginning of the gameplay reveal: the voice acting. BIONICLE: Masks of Power will feature voice acting for all characters, and this is just a small taste of what you can expect to hear in the full game. We’ve partnered with Bionicle fan and linguist Outofgloom, creator of the Matoric conlang, and will be using the Matoran Language scripts that he created for the voiceover you’ll hear in the game!
Finally, we’d like to talk about the Team Kanohi Parts Pack, and some of the work that’s gone into modeling all the parts that will appear in BIONICLE: Masks of Power.
We are publicly releasing the 3D models of each Bionicle piece that has been modeled for use in BIONICLE: Masks of Power for free. Many of the models for these parts were taken from Bricklink’s Stud.io program, and heavily modified by members of our team for increased set accuracy and optimization for use in Unreal Engine. This parts pack includes over 190 different pieces, all fully textured for use in any engine or project that you want to use them for. We’re very excited to show off all of the work that we’ve put into each individual piece, and hope that others will be able to use them for projects of their own.
You can download the Parts Pack here: https://spiritforge.maskofdestiny.com/play/downloads/Team%20Kanohi%20Parts%20Pack.zip
All of us at Team Kanohi would like to say thank you to everyone who’s supported us this past year as we’ve continued to work on BIONICLE: Masks of Power. If you’re interested in hearing more news about the project, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to stay up-to-date on all the latest announcements, or join our Discord server to chat with some of our developers, and even see some exclusive behind-the-scenes content.
Thank you for reading, and may the Great Spirit guide you.
