In AoW3 the halflings are squishy weaklings who have a generalized RNG-dependent luck power to compensate for their fragility. In Planetfall the Oathbound are giant stompy mechs who have a variety of specialized non-RNG luck powers to compensate for their melee focus in a game emphasizing ranged combat.
SourgeBringer is a 2D ninja-platformer spectacle roguelite that's about shooting, dash attacking, and comboing your way through a maze of monster-infested arena rooms. The premise is it's the future and a transdimensional tower/gun/ship has poked into our reality and for ages has methodically nuked city after city until the remnants of humanity are reduced to techno barbarianism. You play a woman with a sword, a gunbot, and enormous hair who's the strongest of her tribe and has been sent into the tower to seek the entities who control it and put an end to the destruction. You aim with the mouse and move with WASD. Your character can double jump, wall-run endlessly, shoot at the crosshairs, dash-slash at the crosshairs, and will remain airborne so long as she's swinging her sword with the LMB, or doing a guard-breaking/stunning/enemy throwing/bullet deflecting heavy attack. The game has an unlockable combo/style meter and like the Devil May Cry games, the higher your style, the more money (blood) you get from kills. Combat in this game is FAST! And it's worth noting that in the accessibility options, you can toggle autofire on for melee attacks and save your mouse finger. The graphics have an 8-bit NES quality, but the music switches between chiptune ambient when exploring, and dunting electric guitars during combat. Spritework is pixelated and cartoony, but you have the option to change from pixelated font to high-def. My one complaint is the game has a lot of unlockables, many of which are core gameplay concepts (like the combo meter or reflecting bullets) and you're gonna have to do a lot of grinding to get the full gameplay experience. This may be a positive for some players. Fast and furious ninja gameplay in bite-sized roguelite servings, I heartily recommend!
There are a lot of Quake 1 clones lately like Dusk and Amid Evil, but Ultrakill is not one of them. This is a Devil-May-Cry-esque character action game crossed with the controls of an FPS. While you CAN hang back at a distance and plink enemies to death in the beginning, your score will be terrible and the tougher challenges ahead will eat you for lunch. Ultrakill is about getting right up in enemies faces, sending them as a group flying in the air, then detonating the lot with a grenade to shower you in healing blood and getting a massive boost to your style meter for a "fireworks" multikill. Movement abilities in this game are insane. Unlimited slide, 3 boost dashes (with air dash option) with a regenerating charge meter, triple wall jump, ground pound that does massive damage and sends the survivors flying into the air. But the more you dig into this game the more hidden depth it reveals. With perfect timing you can punch enemy bullets back at them with an explosive damage boost. But did you know that with even more perfect timing you can punch your own shotgun shells and give THEM an explosive damage boost as well? The more you dig, the more insane the options and the better your style score. Absolutely loving this demo and really looking forward to the final product on GOG. If you want something fast-paced and insane, you owe it to yourself to try this demo.
I've been getting a solid 60fps at 1080p with an i9 9900k, 32 gigs of Ram, but a 1660 Super budget-gpu. The game has an auto-detect for graphics settings and I stuck with the suggestions. I had a crash to desktop while messing around in options, and LOD popup is noticeable in the slow parts, but I haven't had any of the awful bugs streamers complained of in the review build. Serious Sam 4 is more akin to Overload than nuDOOM. A recreating of classic FPS' gameplay with some modern refinements, but not the best gfx available at the time. It is not a radical reimagining. It looks like Serious Sam, it plays like Serious Sam, the level design is Serious Sam levels.
Drox Operative 2 is a sequel to the most wonderfully bizarre game in Soldak's catalogue of living world ARPGs. You the player are a spy playing an ARPG within an active 4X game being played by the computer factions. But now everything is bigger, faster, and crazier. The premise is you're a member of the Drox, a Bene Gesserit-style organization that manipulates the governments busy colonizing the galaxy from the shadows. You the player present yourself to them as an elite mercenary for hire in their ongoing war, but your true motive is to make sure whatever government manages to come out on top, they will be firmly in the pocket of the Drox. Like all Soldak games, the procedurally generated galaxy is very much alive and does not wait for you. Leave a mission for too long and it could expire. Allow a space monster too much free reign and it could amass an army of offspring. Fail to come to an ally's defense in time and they could be wiped out. The game is controlled through an ARPG-like interface, but the recommended controls use WASD for tank-style movement. Be ready for this game to be a lot faster than any previous Soldak game, the ships move faster, their fired projectiles move faster, it definitely leans more heavily in the the ACTION part of ARPG. But it's not all Diablo, it also has a generous helping of "The Last Federation." Selectively choosing which missions to take isn't the only way you'll influence the 4X war, you'll be planting spies, sponsoring diplomatic missions, taking on AI-controlled faction ships as companions, and so on until the political situation is right where the Drox want it. And then you roll up a higher-level sector to run with all your experience and equipment carried over. The main downsides are the aging indie production values and all the little ways it makes clear this engine was made for a fantasy ARPG, like how items go "plop" in space. A truly unique game and one of the best, highly recommended!
Gemcraft is a tower defense game whose main feature is modular tower design. Each defense consists of a base building (towers shoot projectiles, traps harm enemies walking over them, amplifiers boost adjacent towers, etc) and is powered by a gem which gives the tower its elemental properties (Blue gems slow, green gems poison, yellow gems add a chance to crit, etc). You can build base buildings ANYWHERE and also add wall tiles to assist with mazing, but the more buildings of a type you build, the higher the cost, including wall tiles, so you need to be strategic with when and how you build your mazes. Gems, on the other hand, have a set cost to create, upgrade, and/or combine. Combination gems have weaker elemental effects but do more damage. Note that while the game looks super hectic in videos, you have the option to pause and build any time you want. Outside of play you earn XP for passive skills and have a talisman that can slot jigsaw puzzle piece-shaped random stat boosts. Each map is playable in story mode, endless mode, and puzzle mode. There are HOURS of gameplay here if you want it. The downside is the production values are one step above programmer art. The music is just a faint mystical ambient track. However the enemies DO have a very satisfying "POP" sound when they die. The options and combinations this game offers the player are staggering. If you want tower defense, you get a lot of bang for your buck with gemcraft!
Fell Seal is the Final Fantasy Tactics 2 we always wanted but never got. All the job-switching skill-slotting min-maxing madness of FFT, none of the "laws" or other terrible ideas of the FFT Advance games.
