Back in March, Gameloft announced a new 3D action game called Backstab. Strangely, the game seemed to be an exclusive to the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play phone which also launched that month. Most people speculated that the title would eventually make its way to iOS, and indeed we did get our hands on an iPad version of Backstab at E3 earlier this month, though we still didn't know when it would be hitting the App Store. Today, Gameloft has officially announced via their Twitter that Backstab will be launching this Thursday the 23rd, and have released new screens and a trailer which you can see below:

As you can see from the trailer, Backstab has a heavy pirate theme going on but gameplay looks really similar to the stealth-style killing of the Assassin's Creed series. I never played the Xperia version of the game, so am not really qualified to say if that is a winning mashup or not, but it's definitely intriguing. At least we won't have long to wait before putting the game through its paces when it launches on Thursday. Until then you can check out the new screenshots at Gameloft's Facebook page or partake in a discussion of Backstab in our forums.