Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is a 3rd person platformer crossed with light Tony Hawk-style trick combo mechanics in a stylized cel-shaded future with a killer hip-hop soundtrack HEAVILY influenced by Sega's classic Jet Set Radio series. The premise is you're a robotic head attached to the decapitated body of one of New Amsterdam's top graffiti artists, and you're trying to track down your lost head by helping your adoptive gang, the Bomb Rushers, tag landmarks all over the city and force rival gangs to admit their dominance. No, I will not explain further, just go with it. You explore the wacky city of New Amsterdam for ideal graffiti spots and collectibles to the sounds of the funky soundtrack. The ideal way to travel is grinding the city's many, many rails, doing tricks along the way to charge up your jetpack for super speed and air-control. Tagging graffiti points involves a gesture-click QTE where you connect dots on a star shape, and the order in which you connect the dots determines what specific art you leave there (and you have the option to change it later). One change from JSR is you now have the option to step off your wheels when you need to navigate tight corners or engage in breakdancing-esque combat. Not all characters use inline skates, some use skateboards or bikes. The graphics are as good or better than the JSR originals, and the music is full of bangers. My main complaint is the lack of a DJ Professor K-style narrator makes the cutscenes way drier than they need to be, just consisting of generic voice grunts over text. I've been waiting for a Jet Set Radio 3 for years, and Bomb Rush Cyberfunk is as close as we're likely ever going to get. Two thumbs up!
The Last Spell is an isometric turn-based tactics SRPG siege battle roguelite against literal armies of the undead, all set to a dunting metal guitar/darkwave soundtrack. The premise is a magical nuclear war has devastated the world and the fallout has resurrected the population as slavering mutant zombies. You command the population of a half-demolished village and a tiny handful of heroes who must build walls and siege weapons, then garrison them with overpowered champions to hold the dead at bay while a circle of mages in the center of town desperately channel a spell that will end the madness by banishing magic from the world once and for all. The heroes are fantastically customizable, getting most of their active abilities from equipment. You can cast a devastating chain lightning spell with your magic book, then swap to a sword/dagger combo to finish off the survivors up close, for example. All heroes start with inherent perks and maulses as well as random skill trees to suggest builds. Town management is all about supporting the heroes, from mana shrines to restore their spell points, to gold mines to fund new buildings, to blacksmiths that provide a free weapon every round. You also have a worker population who can be assigned advanced tasks in your support buildings, or just clear away the numerous enemy corpses for money and unlock points. Then you surround all of it in a circle of walls and static defenses to give backup to your heroes. The one thing that may be a negative for some is most of the variety in gameplay is gated behind an enormous unlock system comparable to Dead Cells' where you use enemy souls and completed achievements to unlock everything from new weapon and building types to universal boosts to hero stats. Fortunately it unlocks during the game and you benefit from the effects instantly. Think Final Fantasy Tactics meets They Are Billions. I love it!
Spellforce: Conquest of Eo is a story-heavy 4X/RPG hybrid similar to games like Thea or Stellaris. Unlike previous games in the series it is not an RTS. The gameplay is turn-based on hex-grid maps and more resembles Age of Wonders 3 than Spellforce 3. The main gameplay conceit of SCoE is to keep that 4X early-game exploration heavy gameplay going all the way from start to finish. You don't build cities in this game, instead you have a mobile wizard's tower that extends a zone of control that can gather finite resources from surrounding mines. As resources run out and story needs dictate, you pull up stakes and fly your tower to greener pastures. This avoids the late-game micromanagement grind of most Master of Magic clones where the entire map has been painted in colonies. Your main wizard can have 3 different archetypes, which translate most strongly to the crafting system. As you win battles and clear dungeons you collect a random assortment of ingredients that Alchemists can turn into spell-like consumables, Necromancers can turn into undead minions, and Artificers turn into magic equipment and glyphs that can add permanent bonuses to units. Beyond your archetype, you can customize your wizard by choosing two schools of magic to research. Combat is hex-based IGO-UGO gameplay very similar to AoW3 with 3 action points per unit, flanking attacks, and additonal details like height advantage. Note that your main wizard can't cast spells directly during combat, you buff and debuff from the map screen. But many alchemist consumables are functionally equivalent, like letting a cornered unit gulp a fire breath potion. Maps are not randomly generated, but the locations of mines, lairs, and resource piles are. You get 5 gigantic maps to play through and thanks to being handcrafted they can sport landmarks like cities the size of Minas Tirith. Every game follows a scripted story like Thea, but while the main story beats are always the same, many details branch randomly.
