One of my favourite aspects of the campaign in Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 was that it allowed you to embrace your inner turtle. Or at least, hunkering down and building a powerful base to fight back the enemy was my favoured playstyle. The problem I’ve found with many RTS titles since those halcyon days is that single-player titles are focused on small-scale squad management, while multiplayer and RTS is an oxymoron in my lexicon.
All in all, when I finally got around to starting up Age of Darkness: Final Stand – having initially installed when released in Early Access last October – I found myself feeling very comfortable.
So, you know when you’re watching a zombie film and you really just want that particular survivor to bite the bullet? Well, Too Many Humans, the reverse-tower defence game by RealityZ games aims to give you that power. Ever wanted to control a horde of zombies? Then jump right in folks…
I do enjoy it when a mod reaches the big time and launches as a standalone game. Think of Counter-Strike and DOTA2 and you have two genre defining games that were born from mods. I’m not going to make an outlandish claim that The Forgotten City is going to be a genre defining release, but for something which originated as a Skyrim mod, it is an extremely impressive adventure.
Hit the break for some thoughts, but watch out: spoilers lie below.
I like fish, but I don’t like eating them, nor do I have any interest in trying to catch them. Yet when it comes to Moonglow Bay, I’m not only enjoying catching them, but I’m learning more about them, as well as making tasty meals from my catch.
This is a charming, voxel-art lightweight RPG from developer Bunnyhug and published by Coatsink, which sees you take a rookie angler to east coast Canada to restore the fortunes of the rundown town of Moonglow Bay. You open the game by creating your character from a small number of pre-set looks, complete with choice of pronouns. Should a game featuring the ability to choose your own pronouns be something worth having to highlight? No, it should be common place in games where you create your own character, but I’ll applaud Bunnyhug and Coatsink for producing an open and inclusive game.
Deathloop is undeniably an Arkane game, but it very far removed from the Dishonored titles. It’s also a very good game, with two fantastic lead characters and is one that I personally would highly recommend to anyone who is interested in games.
My Battlefield history is filled with moments where I dive into incoming fire to revive a fallen comrade, typically to just end up dying myself. I love the Battlefield games, but I’d never count myself as even being in the top 50% of players when it comes to metrics like the overblown K:D ratio or score per minute. What matters to me is teamwork with all that entails with the revives, throwing around health packs and capturing control points. Having played the Battlefield 2042 open beta over the last couple of days, I’m pleased that these elements of action still exist, but am left wondering whether they’ll be recognised in the broader meta of the game.
Before I get into that in any further detail, hit the break for my first impressions of EA and DICE’s upcoming title.
For years, modding communities of many games have joked about the TTT (Time-Till-Thomas). Release any game, give it even the slightest amount of moddability and eventually, inevitably, inescapably, someone will put Thomas the Tank Engine in it. Skyrim, Resident Evil, Among Us, Fallout and may more have experienced the appearance of the friendly blue engine, often in a twisted and terrifying way, so it’s no great surprise that finally someone’s decided to make a horror game about a train. …
It was way back in March that I spoke with Pourya ‘Redfirm’ Arami about Commanding Nations, an ambitious RTS taking inspiration from the legendary Command and Conquer. I’ve been quietly keeping track of the progress Seven Volts games have been making, and things seem to be taking shape with an Early Access launch targeted for February 2022 and a Kickstarter campaign soon to kick-off.
Mini Motorways made its debut on Steam at the end of July, and will be coming to the Nintendo Switch next year, but it still feels absolutely like a mobile game at heart. Perhaps, though, I should correct myself there. It feels like a touch game at heart. This isn’t some in-app purchase driven knock-off, but a very smartly thought-out city builder that begs to be picked up and played, one which will undoubtedly find a very welcome home on the Switch.
Coming to Mini Motorways on the PC without having played it, or its predecessor Mini Metro, I was immediately struck by how clean and fresh it looked. I’m a sucker for good-looking art, and with Mini Motorways, where everything is fairly minimalistic, there is more than enough character to draw me in. I love the way the cities expand as the days and weeks tick by, but in such a subtle fashion that you don’t realise that you’ve progressed from managing the road network of a village at the start, to now trying to tame the sprawl of a megalopolis. A sprawl that is all your own doing.
The end of game reviews of your city are what I live for.
Once a few in-game weeks have passed and your starting route between two houses and one work place has grown exponentially, it’s wonderful to take a moment to pause, delete your original road networks and create things afresh to best take account of how your city has evolved. A city that has evolved to grow around your roads, with houses sprouting in the most awkward of spots but able to be ignored. Meanwhile the new business that sets up on the other side of a river when you have run out of bridges to plop down will be what finally brings a game to an end.
It might not be your traditional city builder, and yes it might work best on a touch device, but Mini Motorways is a gem, and comes highly recommended.
Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock, you’ll know it’s Olympics time, and Team GB have Sky Brown competing in the park discipline. Today you can (nearly) emulate Sky with The Ramp, an indie skateboarding title from Paul Schnepf.
Unlike Sky’s adventures in Tokyo, The Ramp features vert skateboarding across a handful of locations, and that’s pretty much it. On the Steam page, Paul describes The Ramp as offering you 15 minutes of flow for “the price of a medium sized cinnamon pistachio latte”.
The Ramp is out right now on Steam, and I’ll be putting down the price of a fancy coffee for 15 minutes of flow.
