Sanctus Reach is a turn-based tactics game in the Warhammer 40K universe that has you playing as the Space Wolves backed up by Imperial Knight mechs fighting off an invasion of crazy soccer hooligan Orkz with their own giant robots. Missions present you with unit points to spend on your army and a randomly generated pool of units to pick from. Infantry units are squad-sized, with a smattering of tanks, transports, and aerial support units mixed in. Battles take place on a square grid with fog of war, cover, and limited overwatch mechanics. Melee units tend to hard-counter ranged units if they can get close enough, and morale-oriented but vulnerable weapons like flamers can render tough squads harmless. Campaign mode is a mixture of hand-crafted levels and random skirmish maps. Units in campaign mode can gain XP, and leveling up grants them a new piece of wargear that adds abilities like grenades or anti-bullet shielding, and so on. This is great looking for a Slitherine game and so-so in the general market. Units are intentionally designed to look like tabletop models come to life and the game succeeds there. The model for the Gorkanaut with the ork turret gunner is a beauty. But their actual animations, weapon effects, and voice acting are worse than the original Dawn of War from 2004. Though I do like that bolters look and sound like the rapid-fire grenade launchers they're supposed to be instead of generic assault rifles. The major downfall of the game is its awful soundtrack. The song most missions default to is this weird war-march horror-movie hybrid that is nonstop dissonant strings. It's a satisfying if not spectacular tactical wargame. The unit selection is huge, especially with the Imperial Guard DLC. You have random map generation for plenty of replay value. Every unit type seems to fill a role. And there are rumors of an upcoming chaos expansion. It's good, not incredible, but as close to the tabletop as you'll probably ever get on PC.
Nine Parchments is an isometric overhead twinstick shooter in a fantasy universe built around madcap co-op antics with low-consequence team-kills aplenty. Unfortunately in singleplayer that means fighting a small amount of bullet-sponge enemies in a wide open arena with a painfully slow movement system. To be fair, there's more of an emphasis on position in this game with many enemy attacks cutting off portions of the map and boxing you into a corner, but it's all so slow-paced that it's just painful. Yes it's by the Trine people, but unlike the gorgeous backdrops of the 2D platformer Trine 2, you're mostly looking at dirt and cobblestones with the overhead camera, though they do have occasional moments where you're traversing a cliff so they can show off some pretty sights. All in all it's an okay game that would merit one or maybe two stars more if you have a co-op partner. Otherwise I'd suggest Nex Machina, Forced Showdown, or Trine 2 before getting this.
Megaton Rainfall is a first-person superhero game about fighting off an alien invasion on a procedurally generated Earth while trying carefully not to be the Snyderverse Superman. You control a purple transparent electrified hero who can fly, is completely invincible, and over the course of the game picks up a variety of powers that are just different enough from Superman's powers to avoid a lawsuit. Instead of having a healthbar for yourself, the healthbar represents civilian lives in the vicinity of the attack and if too many innocents die, you start back over at the last checkpoint. The action is a combination action game and spatial puzzle because every alien has one or more red weakpoints that you need to shoot at just the right angle to kill them quickly and harmlessly. How and when they reveal their weakpoint and how to take advantage of that is the puzzle. One thing that complicates matters is your own ridiculous power. If you shoot a slow-moving fireball at an alien and miss, it can easily tear through a city block and rack up absurd civilian casualties. Graphics-wise, this is the engine No Man's Sky wishes it had. I'm running an i5-2500k CPU and thanks to the adaptive detail option in the menu run the game at a consistent 60fps. It's kind of jaw dropping how smooth the transition is from floating in deep space to standing at street level looking a (blocky) pedestrian in the face. What's more there is an entire multi-galaxy universe to explore in this game once you unlock the powers, but only Earth is inhabited. On the downside, you can't rebind keys or even invert mouselook (as of 1.0). There are only nine missions, with a hard mode and score attack for the aftergame, though you can freeroam in between missions and look for scraps of random lore. Also there is no VR support for the PC version. Overall it falls in the same category as Superhot. Fun while it lasts, but so short it's more a proof of concept than a fully realized game.
Dunno what exactly Eugene Jarvis' input on this game was exactly, but it seems to have worked because out of zillions of twin-stick shooters that come out every week, this is the closest to Robotron in spirit I've ever played. Like Robotron, you balance fighting off waves of enemy robots with their own behavior patterns with rescuing hapless humans before they get splattered or brainwashed by the robots. The arenas are not randomly generated and chock full of secrets and secret rooms to discover (and subsequently boost your score even further.) You're armed with a basic lead hose cannon and an invincibility dash with a short recharge. You can accumulate up to five power ups plus a rechargeable super attack like a beam weapon or a sword. Once your powerups are maxed out, the game starts dropping score multipliers. Let me make this clear: it's an arcade game. You want lore, you want unlockable perks, you want QTEs, look elsewhere. You hit start and without the slightest bit of story you're dumped straight into your first arena. These games are meant to be played multiple times for high scores. Graphics are rendered in voxels with enemies and destructible scenery exploding in showers of cubes. However, despite the chaos on the screen you never get lost because there's a clear color shorthand that lets you pick out enemies, humans, and yourself at a glance. Like I said in the title, it's Robotro 2084 with modern graphics, and that's a bar not many copycats manage to reach.
Brigador is an isometric vehicle-based tactical shooter with light stealth elements and a color saturated 80s cyberpunk aesthetic where you play a soldier on a soon-to-be invaded world who's been bribed into turning traitor and doing as much damage as possible to the planet's defenses before jumping onto a shuttle and escaping rich. Gameplay consists of being dropped into a battlefield filled with unsuspecting military units. Generally speaking a head-on assault is suicide in this game, you need to take careful consideration of the (destructible and occasionally explosive) terrain to take them apart piecemeal without raising the alarm. A big part of this involves flanking foes by smashing through buildings like the Kool-Aid man, guns blazing. At the moment there are 37 campaign missions and 18 freelance campaigns with randomly generated enemy forces. You get 56 vehicles to choose from and 42 weapons to arm them with. Vehicles include mechs, tanks, and hovercrafts (agravs). Thanks to the sim elements piloting a heavy mech almost feels like a completely different game than a light agrav. Suffice to say you get a lot of bang for your buck with this game. On the flipside, this IS a game with a learning curve. The biggest challenge is the aiming system which uses laser sights to track your weapon's trajectory in 3D and requires you to intersect the line with the enemy instead of just pointing your cursor at them. Also this new version of the game defaults to a simplified control scheme, but if you want the best controls change movement to "relative" in the settings menu. There are lots of games where you pilot a tank or giant mech through a city, few model the kind of brutal destruction that would result with the aplomb of Brigador. Couple that with an excellent synthwave soundtrack and this is the best game for blowing off steam since Crusader: No Remorse. Highly, highly recommended!
This is an early impression but so far Regalia is a gem! The premise is you've inherited a kingdom fallen into ruin and are tasked by a sinister but surprisingly reasonable debt-collector to rebuild the kingdom and generate the wealth necessary to pay off your substantial debts. So every chapter you have a limited number of days to finish the story missions and other assigned side tasks or else you'll be having a talk with the debt collector's purple trolls in top hats. Gameplay involves three activities. First is spending time and resources in your kingdom to do everything from construct and upgrade buildings to cementing your friendship with party members and NPCs (No romances here, it's all about the bonuses that come from friendship levels). Second is choose-your-own-adventure style text quests (parent warning: despite the cartoony visuals the story involves adult humor). Finally, and the meat of the game, is the isometric tactical combat. Combat is turn-based in a grid arena. Characters all have 1 passive and four active abilities (with a cooldown) plus an ultimate technique. There's a rage-meter that builds every combat round that can either be spent for extra basic actions or to activate an ultimate technique. You get one move and one action per round, and taking action does not affect your remaining move points so hit and run tactics are definitely viable. So far my impression is a lot of thought went into the combat system. The party levels up as a whole so you can use whichever characters you want on an expedition. Team members can equip one weapon and two trinkets as well as slot perks (changeable at any time) and can upgrade their abilities as their friendship level increases. Expeditions into dungeons and wilderness are an FTL-like node-hopping affair (not randomly generated). There are some niggling problems with the interface, but the devs have already said they're going to patch them. Recommended!
I wanted to love this game. I wanted Quake with randomly generated levels. Unfortunately the designers shoehorned in several mechanics from slow modern shooters that don't work in high speed 90s FPS gameplay. There are three key flaws: First, artificial bullet spread. In Strafe your shots have an artificial spread area that gets wider the longer you shoot. That's fine for a cover shooter where you have time to line up your shots, but in a high speed bunny-hopping rocket-jumping 90s FPS you need the bullets to hit the dot. The effect of this mechanic is no matter the gun you pick up, treat it like a shotgun because if you aren't in the enemy's face you're probably gonna miss and waste precious ammo. The second flaw is RPG mechanics. Instead of ammo and health, crates in this game contain stat boots, such as accuracy, which reduces the artificial spread. Pick up enough and maybe by the end of the game you'll be as accurate as the Quake marine was on level one! RPG mechanics only work in action games when adding to the player's options, not imposing artificial incompetence. Finally, the guns use clips. It's worse than it sounds because if you hit the reload key you don't just top up the ammo in your current clip, you THROW AWAY all the remaining bullets in your old clip. If you instinctively reload during action lulls, you're going to run out of ammo in no time. But even worse, your weapons' secondary fire uses the same ammo as primary. So the assault rifle spends 16 bullets (out of a base 25 round clip) to shoot a grenade. What happens if you hit the grenade button with less than 16 bullets in your clip? You throw out the remaining bullets, take the time to replace the clip, and THEN fire the grenade at the enemies who are probably no longer in the nicely packed group you meant to shoot at five seconds ago. How did this flaw not get spotted in playtesting? Maybe these flaws will be patched out eventually, but for now wait for a sale.
