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Evrac Studio's incremental RPG hands you the one job nobody volunteers for. The party swings on its own, you spend mana, and four hours later you have a 200 node skill tree and a permanently asleep tank who is somehow still standing. A$5.75, and it ends before it wears out.
Halo Studios rebuilt Combat Evolved in Unreal Engine 5 and the sandbox is still untouchable, but the writing hands the Chief a personality he was never meant to have, turns a death cult into a political faction, and lets Cortana explain the mystery. Beautiful, and the wrong version to start on.
Butterscotch Shenanigans turned a schoolyard argument into a roguelike autobattler, and it works. Forty two dude types, hundreds of rule bending relics and an escalation curve that ends with a hundred little men against a wall of geese. Funny, deep enough to theorycraft, and it is on your phone too.
Prideful Sloth's hands-on town builder finally left early access, and it is transformed by a second controller. The opening hours drag and it is a tycoon game rather than the Animal Crossing clone some people want, but the co-op and its host permission controls make it a rare management sim you can genuinely play with your kids.
A twin-stick roguelike where you play the infection, tear organelles out of the cells you kill and bolt them onto your own body. The build system is the most inventive thing I have played all year, and I lost a week of evenings to it. The basic movement rules are the weak link.
Melbourne's Gameclaw Studio built a side-scrolling RPG about rebuilding a dwarven home one rescued kinsman at a time, and I lost a string of evenings to it. Gorgeous pixel art, a compulsive settlement loop and honest jank in the combat. Recommended.
Rebel Wolves' vampire RPG lands on 3 September with a thirty day deadline, days split into eight spendable units, and a directional parry its director compares to Guitar Hero. Everyone who has played it writes about the clock first.
A leaker claims Ubisoft's eighteen year old sequel has been quietly rebranded and could resurface at The Game Awards. Treat it as rumour, then enjoy the fact that this game has now been in development longer than some of the people waiting for it have been alive.
◆ BREAKINGLance McDonald has surfaced the internal presentation Japan Studio's Daisuke Ishidate gave at GameShare IV in May 2007. It carries a working title, a ship date of June 2008, and a build with a first person camera and no lock-on.
