HIGH Delivers classic wrestling with intriguing updates.

LOW The AI struggles. Special match types are uneven.

WTF Why is there a QTE to complete a ladder match when on top of the ladder?

History has a habit of coming back around in professional wrestling. Whether it’s Ric Flair adopting the mannerisms of “Nature Boy” Buddy Rogers or CM Punk unleashing a Hulk Hogan-esque leg drop at an All-Elite Wrestling (AEW) pay-per-view, the history of this dramatized combat sport is what gives flavor to its competitors and events.

As such, it’s only natural that this reverence for the past in pro wrestling would also extend to wrestling videogames — particularly those developed by the AKI Corporation during the early 2000s. There is a persistent segment of fans that absolutely need to know if any upcoming wrestling title is comparable to WWF No Mercy, the Nintendo 64 classic from AKI that features the beloved “Attitude Era” roster of World Wrestling Federation Entertainment superstars.

Thankfully – mercifully – I am happy to report that AEW Fight Forever not only picks up the torch from those classic AKI wrestling games but carries it forward in new and exciting directions.

The time-tested foundation of AEW Fight Forever comes down to a simple and intuitive control scheme of strikes and grapples, each with weak and strong variations as well as corresponding blocks to repel them.

Strikes do immediate damage, but are generally weaker than most holds that are applied out of a grapple. Grapples, on the other hand, have a more pronounced windup animation that makes them easy to be deflected or even countered into a retaliatory attack. As players take damage, recovery time degrades and gives way to longer stun animations that provide more time to execute devastating attacks.

Along with damage to their opponents, successful attacks also build up momentum that a player can use to trigger a timed “SPECIAL” state where they have access to finishing moves. Once time runs out, the player’s momentum drops enough that they must successfully land multiple attacks to reach that threshold again and, naturally, opposing attacks decrease the player’s momentum as well.

This momentum system not only encourages careful timing, but also rewards players that execute a multi-faceted attack plan. Simply trading blows back and forth won’t build momentum effectively, and settling into the same attacks will give opponents multiple opportunities to learn the timing of how to counter a given move — and the ability to counter consistently is what separates the decent players in AEW Fight Forever from world championship material.

All these core mechanics tie back into that AKI lineage of wrestling game design, which is timeless in the same way that a good fighter can live years beyond its release. Luckily, most of the new features in AEW Fight Forever build upon this rock-solid foundation without compromising any fundamental strengths.

The most notable addition to the in-ring action is the new “SIGNATURE” momentum state, which now precedes the “SPECIAL” state and offers an intermediate tier of moves that have a damage bonus over basic moves. Crucially, the “SIGNATURE” state is not time-limited the same way “SPECIAL” is, so multiple signature moves can be executed to ensure that an opponent will be stunned enough to receive a finishing move for the win.

There are also several new context-sensitive button activations that allow the player to execute location-specific attacks, such as a springboard dive from the top rope onto the area outside the ring. This change gives AEW Fight Forever multiple ways to better reflect the more acrobatic tendencies of its performers, and of modern wrestling in general.

Outside of the ring, many of these new mechanics are tied to active and passive character traits, which comprise the biggest change to the formulawhen it comes to character creation and modification. For the real-life wrestlers that are already on the AEW Fight Forever roster (as well as the custom-created wrestlers that players can create on their own) these traits provide a sorely-needed outlet for characterization beyond a simple list of moves and taunts.

The one new addition that’s more of an odd curiosity than anything else is the chain wrestling mechanic, where two wrestlers start exchanging a series of holds and escapes where players appear to guess opposing button presses. Even though chain wrestling is mentioned in the character traits, there’s no tutorial for it and the couple of times I activated the mechanic in 20+ hours of play came completely by accident. Weird.

There are other aspects of AEW that exhibit a similar lack of polish, though they stand out more as weird quirks than anything that adversely impacts the experience.

For example, players can create their own wrestlers and take these characters through the game’s Road to Elite career mode to level them up, but the improvements don’t consistently reflect across multiple runs. In one instance I couldn’t reassign a different second finishing move on a later playthrough, even though I had unlocked the move slot on an earlier playthrough with that character.

More critically, the AI behavior of computer-controlled opponents seems particularly undercooked. Opponents on Easy difficulty are pushovers that rarely attempt to defend themselves, while wrestlers on harder difficulties are flawless killing machines that counter move after move as though they were in The Matrix. Worst of all, AIs on all difficulties struggle with pathfinding over fallen wrestlers, which can be exploited to get easy pinfalls in multi-man matches. One could make the argument that this is just part of a “faithful” carryover of the old N64 games, but this is one aspect that should have been left to the history books.

It’s the best traits from those classic AKI games that remain at the core of AEW Fight Forever, though, along with some clever and sometimes whimsical additions made along the way. (The Mario Party-esque minigames are, hands down, some of the wackiest additions I’ve seen to any sports game.) Though All Elite Wrestling is still a relatively young wrestling company, it can point to Fight Forever as a great first foray into console gaming and one of the best wrestling games in years.

Rating: 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Yuke’s Co., LTD and published by THQ Nordic and All Elite Wrestling, LLC.It is currently available on XBO/X/S, Switch, PS4/5 and PC.This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 20 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. (Once through Women’s Road to Elite on Easy Difficulty, once through Men’s Road to Elite on Easy Difficulty, and once through Women’s Road to Elite on Normal Difficulty). One hour of play was spent in local multiplayer. There are online multiplayer modes available for all match types, but no online matches could be completed for this review.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Blood, Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco, Violence. ESRB Description: This is a wrestling game in which players compete in matches with wrestlers from the AEW roster. Players use punches, kicks, and grappling maneuvers to drain their opponents’ health. In some match types (e.g., Barbed Wire, Stadium Stampede, Unsanctioned) players can use barbed wired, baseball bats, metal chairs, and Molotov cocktails against opponents, eventually resulting in submission and/or knock outs. Blood-splatter effects can occur during matches, staining the mats; video footage of real matches also depicts blood on wrestlers’ faces and bodies. The game contains some mildly suggestive material: female wrestlers in revealing outfits (e.g., deep cleavage, bunny outfits, partially exposed buttocks); wrestlers performing taunting gestures (e.g., crotch chop, slapping buttocks). Real footage sometimes depicts wrestlers drinking alcohol and smoking. The word “sh*t” is heard in the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers:  This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. There are no audio-only cues in AEW Fight Forever. Subtitles are available for the Road to Elite career mode, where live video segments are played to depict historic moments in the history of All Elite Wrestling. All other storyline segments are depicted through text prompting without voiceover.

Remappable Controls:  Certain functions are remappable. Movement is restricted to the left analog stick, but all other actions can be remapped to different buttons as follows:

HIGH Mechanically satisfying. Surprisingly evocative art and character design.

LOW The premise is thin. The quality of unlockable cards per character is uneven.

WTF Who do we need to bribe to get a daily challenge mode?

In gaming, collaborations don’t always have a happy ending. Sure, when the creators of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest came together to form Squaresoft’s “dream team” in the early ’90s, they ended up producing one of the most beloved games of that era with Chrono Trigger. When Hideo Kojima lent his name and oversight to MercurySteam for the development of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow, however, the results were uneven at best.

As such, it was easy to be skeptical when I heard that Richard Garfield, one of the most famous designers in the history of collectible card games, was partnering with Abrakam Entertainment to create a roguelike deckbuilder called Roguebook. Even as an extension of Abrakam’s underrated Faeria franchise, it still had too many question marks — its Kickstarter campaign barely made it across the finish line and there are already a hundred run-based deckbuilders out there that have already covered similar territory.

As I played through the closed demo for my preview earlier this year, however, I found myself coming back to the beta, even after I had filed my piece. Just like the old PC Gamer demo CDs that wore down the double-speed drive in my childhood computer, this Roguebook beta kept finding its way onto my screen, goading me into thinking thatthiswould be the run that would put it all together.

This intense gravitational pull remains in the final release version, where little has changed from my preview writeup when it comes to the fundamental mechanics. The biggest change is that two more characters join strongman Sorocco and his glass cannon comrade Sharra, but players will have to complete certain events in Roguebook to unlock them.

Beyond that, the core loop of Roguebook remains tight — the player must navigate the obscured pages of the titular tome by defeating enemies with a chosen pair of heroes. Each turn-based combat victory provides a consumable ink or brush, both of which can be used to clear their path on the map  to the boss of each chapter. Exploration of the map can lead to other discoveries as well, such as various treasures, card draft opportunities and alchemist houses where weaker cards can be transmuted (for a price) into stronger combinations of cards and gems, which can be slotted into another card to add a bonus effect.

Other than a few late-game exceptions, Abrakam and Garfield hit all the right notes with their individual card designs, giving each a compelling mixture of flavor and function. The character designs throughout the game are great high-fantasy artworks that are cute and clever without being cloyingly sweet or corny. Most importantly, almost all of the cards are effective at teasing mechanical and narrative synergies with each other, which is the perfect motivator for drawing players into ongoing experimentation.

It’s these synergies in Roguebook that fuel the interplay between the tactical card battles and the more strategic ‘risk vs. reward’ decisions in map exploration. This feedback loop is incredible and a large part of its success lies in its pursuit of a “big deck design.”

Generally, deckbuilders require the player to cultivate a perfect deck, carefully thinning out and pruning functionally dead cards like the malformed branches of a bonsai tree. Roguebook, on the other hand, completely buries that tradition as a core part of its design by incentivizing the player to accumulate cards and build up with passive skills at certain card count thresholds. This larger collection also leads to a natural difficulty ramp — players can’t mount a meaningful challenge to later enemies without picking up more powerful cards, but each card picked up is less likely to be drawn as the card count increases.

Thankfully, Roguebook’s razor-sharp design can still present interesting variations to this loop across multiple runs, even with a postgame hook that is somewhat lacking.

Completing Roguebook unlocks a progression tree of embellishments which are permanent boosts that can be purchased. To keep this from becoming a depressing grind, the postgame also features an epilogue level that’s reminiscent of the heat system in Hades as a part of its New Game+ mode. As the player applies more penalties and modifiers at the start of their run, the epilogue difficulty level increases, along with a corresponding boost to the page reward for completing a run. Unlike Hades, there is no meaningful exposition or narrative texture with each successive run, which is disappointing, but the combinations of modifiers do a fantastic job of interrogating the possibility space that’s teased by earlier (and simpler) playthroughs, throwing one curveball after another into the player’s expectations of both combat and exploration.

It’s easy to think that the run-based deckbuilder genre has been entirely tapped out, but Roguebook counters that notion in an instant. Though its broader narrative and post-game balance may be a little thin, everything else between these pages is incredibly rich and satisfying. By combining the elegance of tabletop map exploration with a thoughtful evolution of deckbuilding mechanics, Abrakam and Richard Garfield have found a match made for the history books.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Abrakam Entertainment SA and published by Nacon. It is currently available on PC via Steam. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on an Alienware Alpha R2. Approximately 50 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode and the game was completed eight times (up to Epilogue Level 7). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: There is no ESRB rating for this game, though there is a provisional 7 PEGI rating. The game presents turn-based combat where melee attacks and magic spells are used to kill enemies. Other than a “bleed” mechanic that is used as a status effect in combat, there is no violence or gore presented through combat. The reviewer did not find any profanity or explicit written content of any kind during their time with the game.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay. There is no voice acting and, thus, no subtitles required for cutscenes. There are no options to resize or recolor text. (See examples above.)

Remappable Controls: Controls are not remappable, as the game is entirely controlled by mouse.

HIGH A richly detailed operational WW2 strategy that plays smoothly for wargame vets.

LOW The lack of handholding can be overwhelming for newcomers.

WTF Why are the aerial operations so fussy if the AI automation is turned off?

Even from our precarious vantage point in 2021, the sacrifices of the fallen along the Eastern front of World War II are frozen in time. We have almost a century’s worth of recorded history to tell us how each battle of the German blitzkrieg on the Soviets played out, and how a relentless winter and an unthinkable death toll turned back a seemingly-inevitable Nazi victory.

The Eastern Front is the largest military clash in history and, as such, it’s always felt more at home with the broader scale of strategic wargames where longtime wargaming luminaries Joel Billings and Gary Grigsby have made their home as co-founders of 2by3 Studios. Billings and Grigsby have been sharpening this sword for decades, so their release of War in the East 2 aims to carry forward this tradition to a contemporary audience.

The 500+ page manual that comes with War in the East 2 is a profound example of this tradition, for better or worse. It’s a luxurious tome that painstakingly documents all the game mechanics along with extensive reasons for historical (or deliberately ahistorical) design choices. As an object of study, it offers numerous avenues for further exploration and contemplation away from the game itself.

Frustratingly, the manual is also written in the language of the converted, carrying an expectation that the reader is already well-versed in all the basics. A small, but telling example: a diagram of the NATO counters used to describe unit types and strengths — one of the most fundamental pieces of information for reading the game — is unceremoniously thrown into an appendix near the back of the book, without any surrounding information. And why wouldn’t it be? Anybody that’s already played a historical WW2 wargame will almost certainly be familiar with the iconography, right?

This brings us to the fundamental tension at play with War in the East 2 and, maybe, with wargaming in general. The manual’s guided walkthrough of the Velikie Luki scenario does an admirable job of trying to ameliorate these difficulties by talking through the ground-level interactions of playing the first few turns in a small pocket of the map. While I welcome this description of the higher-level strategies of the battlefield, it’s a bit like a pool floatie in the face of a tsunami. There’s very little handholding to help onboard newcomers to the Eastern Front or wargaming in general, which leaves all of this richly detailed and satisfying text as a sermon to the veteran wargamer that’s already fluent enough in the genre conventions to tease out different dynamics and interactions in a self-guided way.

As such, War in the East 2 is a game that caters to players willing to tinker, their imagination sparked by unanswered questions raised in the manual or maybe even by other writings on the Eastern Front. It’s a philosophy that unquestionably renders a ludo-mechanical value judgment — players that aren’t willing to get their hands dirty with experimentation will either find themselves becoming that type of player over time and enjoying it, or quickly moving on to greener pastures. War is hell, after all.

So, despite this narrow focus – or maybe even because of it – War in the East 2’s turn-based combat offers a remarkably smooth ride once (if?) players settle into the fundamentals. Like a driving simulator with a collection of assists for braking and turning, 2by3’s design offers AI automation for players to potentially delegate some of the wonkier items like supply maintenance and air directives, leaving them to focus solely on maneuvering units on the ground. Though a “we-go” system of simultaneous turn resolution might have provided a more historically resonant simulation of the battles here, the more conventional “you-go-I-go” turn-based system imbues the proceedings with the look and feel of a board game, albeit one that’s rendered in eye-popping statistical detail.

At first, this relentless bombardment of company names and caliber numbers feels like a flex, as though doubt will surely poison the entire experience unless The Grognard can sufficiently trace every little historical detail to its natural conclusion. With persistence and practice, though, these details all begin to recede into the background as texture and embellishment, letting the carefully designed interplay of combat and movement come to the fore.

Thankfully, the AI cleverly works within the roles prescribed by history — the aggressive Axis general must advance with as much manpower and materiel as possible to close off avenues for counter-attack, while the stalwart Soviet counter-offensive has to hold the line by relentlessly punishing each Axis overreach. Numerous supplemental mechanics add further texture to these dynamics, such as conditional zone of control rules and penalties to units that attack after moving in the same turn.

War in the East 2 is a great wargame, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s an approachable one. It further entrenches a tradition that lives more as careful study than fast-and-loose gameplay, standing apart as a stunning reflection of the Eastern Front conflict that it simulates. As I peer down from the parapets, bolstered by the obligation of a generous review period, I find it a little too easy to tell all the new players held at arm’s length outside the walls of the genre that it’s worth it to climb all the way up here…but just take my word for it that the view is nice, even if the blood-soaked footprints in the Rasputitsa below are frozen, forever, in history.

Disclosures: This game is developed by 2By3 Games and published by Matrix Games. It is currently available on PC via the Matrix Games store. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on an Alienware Alpha R2. Approximately 25 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and five scenarios were completed (Velikie Luki ‘42, Road to Minsk, Operation Typhoon, Vistula to Berlin and Road to Leningrad). No multiplayer game could be completed using the Matrix Games online service, but 2 hours of play were devoted to solitaire PBEM play of the Operation Typhoon scenario.

Parents: There is no ESRB rating for this game, but it presents a turn-based simulation of historical military combat. Other than the opening video featuring a brief segment of bombs being dropped on farmland, there is no visual depiction of violence on the battlefield and the reviewer did not find any profanity or explicit written content of any kind during their time with the game. There are brief sound effects of gunfire or mechanized units (such as tanks or aerial units) mobilizing whenever actions are taken on the map.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay. There is no voice acting and, thus, no subtitles required for cutscenes. There are no options to resize or recolor text. (See examples above.)

Remappable Controls: Controls are not remappable and are locked to a specific set of hotkeys.

When it comes to sci-fi settings that stretch beyond the stars, it feels like the stories too often land on a spectrum between Star Trek’s pristine bureaucracy of benevolent space colonialism and the mythopoetic swashbuckling of benevolent space colonialism in Star Wars. Star Dynasties, the latest grand strategy from Iceberg Interactive and Pawley Games, tries to have it both ways by using a galaxy-shaping disaster as the excuse to dive headfirst into the administrivia of intergalactic feudalism, texturing its space colonialism with a tangled web of shadows and political intrigue.

To accomplish this, Star Dynasties looks to tap into the viral successes of Paradox’s Crusader Kings franchise by rescuing that franchise’s RPG-tinged design from the drudgery of medieval European politics and interpolating its collection of assassinations and familial betrayals into a turn-based frame. The player is positioned not as an individual character that heroically charges forward into conflict, but as one character in an ongoing bloodline whose goal is to further the political standing of their house, even if that means greatness must be achieved by future heirs to the family line.

While many grand strategy games go deep into a lengthy tech tree of gradual advancement, this ‘lineage’ approach goes wide with a dizzying array of actions available from the jump. As the head of a feudal house, the player has a network of family and council members at their disposal. They can be assigned various tasks in Star Dynasties, much like a worker placement board game, and each character carries a set of ability scores that influences their effectiveness. From the shadowy levers of espionage and sabotage to the (mostly) benign statecraft of colonial infrastructure, these tasks and their trusted appointees will steer the player’s fiefdom from turn to turn.

Of course, by giving players such an extensive palette of mechanics to work with, Star Dynasties must also overcome the challenge of how to present all those actions in a concise and legible way, which will be an ongoing battle all the way to release.

Tooltips do a lot of legwork in providing useful context behind the dozens of icons that litter the game’s UI, but the guided tutorial scenario also does a serviceable job of introducing different UI elements. I found that the quick bar in the lower-left corner of the screen was especially useful for setting up comparisons between characters, since so much of the strategy comes down to careful study of relationships.

That complex web of interactions also means that players should have measured expectations for the AI in this early build. Just to take one of my own turns as an example, a rival duke condemned me for one of my earlier actions and then, later in the very same turn, that duke became my ally by accepting a vassalage from an associated ruler in my star system. The sprawl of available actions can make it difficult for both human and AI players to land on an effective long-term strategy, so it will be up to the designers at Pawley Games to find an effective way to signal when the most meaningful components of a winning strategy come into view.

Despite the rough edges, I still see a great deal of promise in Star Dynasties. The absurd level of systemization of the interactions is almost a marvel in itself, and the raw design can certainly be refined and polished via Early Access period, especially when the developers are attentive and responsive as they were for our questions when we spoke with Glen Pawley from Pawley Games.

The combat in Star Dynasties has a sort of pen-and-paper RPG feel to it, with its character abilities and dice rolls to resolve attacks. How did your team go about designing these elements?

Star Dynasties is fundamentally a game about characters, politics, and social drama. Combat is important, because conflict is at the heart of interesting narrative, but it shouldn’t distract from the character-driven experience.

One rule I wanted to stick to is that the player does not build units directly, or move units around on the map. That’s a big part of what makes for a complex and time-consuming tactical layer. So I wanted to find ways to deepen the moment of combat, and in ways that would have an impact on decisions the player would take outside it.

Character abilities are a perfect way to give you interesting decisions in combat, while reinforcing the character-focus of the game. The intention is to make characters more valuable based on the tactics they know, make the choice of who will command the fleet more interesting, and provide an interesting combat decision.

One element of the game’s star map that caught my attention was the appearance of “uncolonized systems”, which are described as non-interactive systems that humanity no longer has the technology to colonize. How did this concept influence your team’s approach to the game’s map generation?

Uncolonized systems were created as a way of solving two design problems.

First, politics and combat in Star Dynasties are more interesting if there is a moderately high degree of connectivity between systems. Contrast, for example, a star system that has two lanes (one with the rest of your empire and the other with your neighbour) with a star system that has four lanes (potentially exposing it to 3 neighbours). The latter scenario will create more interesting interactions.

Now simply increasing the number of lanes per system creates a map that looks like a land map, and doesn’t fit our theme. The use of uncolonized systems, that essentially “split” lanes into two or three, is an alternative way of increasing the connectivity between systems. And it fits perfectly into our setting, where a pre-Collapse humanity would not have had the resources or technology to colonize every star system it could reach.

The other design consideration is that, because combat in Star Dynasties locks you into using the military resources of the surrounding region (you don’t move units on the map, so you can’t bring in military units from another part of your empire), the geography of the region around the combat location directly contributes to how interesting the combat is. Systems in regions with lots of empty systems are harder to conquer, because your fleets suffer supply penalties over longer distances.

What are the team’s plans for supporting the game once you formally move out of Early Access?

For a start, naturally I’ll keep resolving any issues that arise with the game after launch.

The world of Star Dynasties is ripe with areas that could be explored further. One idea I’m very fond of would be to introduce the concept of different cultures for different parts of the galaxy. Another would be to add other organizations, such as guilds, or pirate bands. Players have already suggested many other areas such as tutoring children, or creating more interaction with those uncolonized systems we talked about earlier.

Of course, as a solo developer, my ability to keep supporting the game with more features will depend on how well the game does financially. But I would love the opportunity to keep adding more systems and content to the game after we launch it.

*

Many thanks to Glen Pawley for speaking with us! Star Dynasties is currently in Early Access and available on Steam.

HIGH Flashes of brilliant design. Solid arcade-style training modes.

LOW Weapons are frustratingly underpowered. Progression is too grindy.

WTF Why can’t I preview the items I’m buying for my ship?

Sometimes, a game developer just can’t outrun their own history, no matter how hard they try. In the case of the Qute Corporation and its long-time design partnership with M-KAI and Mach, it’s the echoes of their earliest works that linger in the memories of space shooter fans.

With 2004’s Judgement Silversword, they shredded through the notes of single-screen classics like Galaga at a speed metal pace. With 2011’s Eschatos, they broke out into a wild ride of scrolling shooter setpieces, expertly weaving through one barrage of bullets after another with sweeping, cinematic 3D camera transitions. Even if Qute had walked away from the industry at that point, they still would have left an indelible mark on the genre with those masterworks.

Enter Ginga Force, an older Xbox 360 scrolling shooter that had previously been limited to Japanese release until Rising Star Games stepped up last year to secure North American distribution.

Unlike those earlier titles, Ginga Force pushes story to the forefront with a constant stream of narration from its titular police force to accompany the on-screen action. It’s an interesting choice that’s incredibly difficult to pull off in practice – with scrolling shooters, the endless torrent of enemies and bullets rarely affords players the opportunity to look away from their ship. As a result, even skillful players will likely require a couple of passes over the English subtitles to read what’s being said by the Japanese voice acting.

The writing itself is decent enough thanks to clever stage designs that provide characters with opportunities to incorporate hints and strategies for important setpieces. These moments might feel somewhat gimmicky in another context, but Qute goes the extra mile to make them resonate with the ongoing chatter — a nice change of pace from the genre’s usual one-note directive to shoot everything and ask questions later, if at all.

Unfortunately, it’s when Ginga Force steps away from those carefully constructed unions of exposition and action that it begins to lose its way.

The first problem is a simple one — the plot that’s delivered by all this writing is disappointingly basic, featuring standard anime archetypes dutifully carrying out predictable twists and betrayals. Given that most scrolling shooters don’t even have a plot, it’s somewhat tempting to look past this as an issue, but Ginga Force can’t help but continually call attention to it with all the narration.

The second problem is more structural and, frankly, surprising — this game is a grind.

As a callback to the more open-ended U.N. Squadron from Capcom, players choose from a series of stages and use the cash earned from completing them to buy improvements to their ship. There’s a wide variety of equipment that could conceivably support a variety of playstyles but everything feels frustratingly underpowered.

Additionally, the prices of upgraded items are often very high and/or locked behind the completion of certain stages, which means that players will likely find themselves stuck with a sub-optimal ship loadout unless they repeat missions over and over to build up their budget.

Frustratingly, Ginga Force is more ambitious than it is good, dragging down its occasional moments of signature Qute brilliance with a glacially-paced story mode in service of a forgettable plot. With much more generous tuning of the progression rewards, this could potentially be an effective gateway title to welcome newer players to the genre. As it is, it’s weirdly perched between the old and new, with too much grind and too much noise to really land for anyone.

Here’s hoping that the recent release of Natsumi Chronicles, a Ginga Force prequel/sequel, carries this intrepid developer to at least one more legendary flight among the stars.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Qute and published by Rising Star Games. It is currently available on PS4 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4. Approximately 7 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed once (all easy difficulty episodes completed in story mode). There are no dedicated multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E due to Mild Fantasy Violence and Mild Language. There is no official description available on the ESRB website, but there are numerous explosions and weapons fire in a militarized science fiction setting. This should be quite safe for any shmup fan of any age.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay. All voice acting is in Japanese, with subtitles appearing at the top of the screen for all dialogue in game. There are no options to resize or recolor text. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Controls are not remappable and are limited to three preset configurations.

One of the most difficult challenges as a game critic is finding the right set of words when something finds its voice through a collection of tiny revisions to existing genre conventions. Steady and competent genre work doesn’t leap off the page and excite a writer’s fingertips with the same intensity as Something New.

So, it’s possible that Roguebook — an upcoming roguelike deckbuilder published by Nacon — could fail to register on anyone’s radar by quietly inserting itself into one of the most popular genres of the last few years. There are no shortages of this kind of experience, and having put hundreds of hours into the heavy hitters (of which there are legion) I can personally attest that the competition is fierce.

However, after playing its pre-release demo, I can say that the high-fantasy flair of Roguebook is worth someone’s time because all of its improvements and iterations add up into something that feels like it could be truly spectacular.

It helps that the Roguebook design team has a remarkable history of card game design to tap for inspiration. Naturally, Richard Garfield is the eye-catching name on the tin and rightfully so, thanks to his genre-defining work with Magic: The Gathering and Netrunner. The developers from Abrakam Entertainment are worthy partners in crime, however, as their sharp design on the overlooked digital CCG Faeria foreshadows many of the systems here.

For instance, one of the more distinctive elements is map exploration, which feels like a natural extension of the way that Faeria players would sculpt the playfield with cards from their hand. Each page of the titular “Roguebook” represents a chapter in the run with a hexagonal map of hidden tiles that the player must navigate to reach a castle, where the chapter’s boss resides. At the beginning of the chapter, the game reveals a direct path of tiles from the entry gate to that castle, but the player can only become strong enough to survive that boss fight if they reveal more of the map to find new cards, items and money to strengthen their deck.

The map has more secrets than just treasure, of course — there are enemy encounters that can be fought to earn additional resources, which brings one of Roguebook’s most interesting tensions into play. To stand any chance against a chapter’s boss encounter, players must manage the risk of exploring the map and fighting enemy encounters without taking so much damage that it ends up tanking their run. It’s a refreshing system that gives a ‘board game’ flavor, with more to offer than simply chasing killer card combos in battle.

Of course, Roguebook has its share of deck-building combat mastery as well, with turn-based battles that focus on directing the actions of a two-character party through a shared deck of cards. The player starts the run by selecting a companion character to go with their hero, and each card in the deck has an action that corresponds to only one character. One twist is that using these cards often moves that character to the front of the party to receive attacks on the enemy’s turn.

The two characters available in the pre-order demo are a perfect combination to explore the subtleties of this system, as players will want to protect the higher damage potential of the Dragonslayer, Sharra, by covering her with defensive parries from the bruising First Mate, Sorocco. Sharra offers more combo-laden damage potential, but leaning too heavily on her will leave her vulnerable on the front line. Sorocco, on the other hand, has almost twice as much health as Sharra, so the player is encouraged to move Sorocco into harm’s way with his cards, even though many of his actions are less powerful at the start.

This dynamic ends up putting a welcome focus on card sequencing that most deckbuilders never bother to touch, and the card designs in Roguebook are carefully tuned to explore every possible angle, including bonuses for the number of times that the party members change places. That emphasis on sequencing (along with a surprising dearth of options for removing cards from the deck) makes it even more important to build a well-rounded collection of cards, rather than relying on a handful of powerful interactions between one or two cards.

All these little genre evolutions come together to make Roguebook one of the most enjoyable deckbuilders I’ve played, even as a limited pre-order demo on PC. I’ll be eager to see what the remaining pages of the Roguebook have in store when the game releases on PC and Nintendo Switch on June 24th.

HIGH A refreshingly tactile presentation of action at the pool table.

LOW Sparse tutorialization, thin sound design, uninteresting career modes.

WTF Why aren’t players allowed to lag for the right to break first?

Throughout the history of sports videogames, there’s always been a tension between faithful recreation and using the iconography of that sport to create an interesting, if unrealistic, digital experience. In the case of something like football, this dichotomy has allowed simpler arcade-style favorites like Tecmo Super Bowl to share a space in gaming’s pantheon with the more intricate entries in the Madden series.

When it comes to billiards, however, videogames always seem to bend toward abstraction, pitting one formless competitor against the other in what amounts to abstracted turn-based strategy. Every cut is carefully measured from an omniscient camera often hovering perfectly over the center of the pool table, every shot is registered with deliberate precision.

Pure Pool, a billiards title from Voofoo Studios, refines their previous work on Hustle Kings into a simulation with a different approach bringing renewed focus to the physicality of the sport.

In this case, the first impression is a direct statement of purpose. Every session of Pure Pool starts by immediately placing the player at an open pool table with a cue in hand. No menus, no prompts. Players already familiar with the controls can jump right into free play without a moment’s hesitation.

Like a movie that’s filmed with a single unbroken take, Pure Pool’s camera is constantly tethered to an eye-level focus on the cue ball. There are no overhead angles to survey the table with perfect information — players adjust their shots by orbiting left or right around the cue ball, or, if they need a more expansive view, walk around the table itself.

The shots share the same spartan quality, with the right analog stick (or the Switch handheld touchscreen) serving as an unforgivingly tactile control over the power of a cue strike and a simple trio of overlays on the table to highlight the trajectories of each shot.

If it feels like this review pays an undue amount of attention to these ground-level mechanics, that’s because Pure Pool bets everything on them for player engagement. There’s little else.

There are only a handful of modes available to cover the most popular variants of billiards or snooker, and Pure Pool assumes that the player is already familiar with their rules. My personal favorite was the fast-paced “Killer,” which was like a billiards version of basketball’s “H-O-R-S-E”.

The career modes lead the player through a series of events that encourage a three-star rating to proceed, with no story or character creation to motivate one beyond checking the boxes.

This lack of detail continues into the environmental design. Every session takes place at a nondescript nightclub with no humans in sight. The sound quality of the shots and of the balls striking each other lacks the distinctive punch the carry in the real world, all too easily blending into the banal soundscape of music and ambient chatter. Players can customize the baize felt of the table at the club, but it’s a purely cosmetic choice. Other than switching up table lengths for snooker, there are no tables that play faster than others because the physics are always the same.

Pure Pool supports local and online multiplayer, but I was never able to successfully find an online match on the Switch servers during my review period. The game does offer the possibility of facing off against an offline “player DNA” AI that runs off observed tendencies from live play, but it’s difficult to assess how accurate that AI can be when so little contextual information is provided at the table.

Ultimately, Pure Pool is exactly what its name suggests, for better and for worse. Players that buy into its fascinating shot presentation may find it enough to overlook the otherwise-flat experience. For everybody else, it will likely be an all-too-quick scratch off the eight ball.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Voofoo Studios and published by Ripstone LTD. It is currently available on PC, XBO, PS4 and Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on Nintendo Switch. Approximately 5 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. During the review period, no live player matches were available to be played for evaluation.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E with no descriptors. Players participate in a turn-based simulation of various billiards games. There is ambient background noise and music that suggests the pool games are played in a club or other social gathering, but no other people or activities outside of the pool game itself are shown.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay, nor is there any voice acting that could potentially require subtitling. There are no options to recolor text. (See examples below.)

Remappable Controls: The controls are not remappable.

HIGH Brilliant illustrations, solid writing, great music.

LOW Poor AI/pathfinding, uneven balance, large armies are awkward to control.

WTF It’s 2020 – why are we still putting stealth missions into RTS games?

The lens of an alternate history can provide many storytelling opportunities, from the stark contemplation of terrifying outcomes narrowly avoided to the realization of a utopian dream just out of reach.

It can also provide an opportunity to blow shit up with giant robots.

The post-WW1 Europe described in the alternate history of KING Art’s Iron Harvest is very willing to indulge in that explosive pursuit by exploring a titanic struggle between giant diesel-fueled mechs and its effects on the nations caught in their wake.

As part of the 1920+ universe (along with popular board game Scythe) Iron Harvest puts these mechs front and center and asks whether the destructive fantasies of dieselpunk warfare can co-exist with more grounded, squad-based tactical play.

The best case for the 1920+ universe comes before the player makes it on the battlefield. Illustrator Jakub Różalski’s artwork on the title card and loading screens strike a fascinating contrast — farmers tend their fields as terrifying, building-sized mechs lord over the horizon.

In Iron Harvest‘s pastoral nightmare there are three nations with real-life European counterparts — Polania (Poland), Saxony (German), and Rusviet (western front of the Soviet Union) – who are brought into conflict over the pursuit of destructive, world-threatening technology.

On the battlefield, Iron Harvest is a modern squad-based RTS. Players issue commands from an overhead view, guiding them to capture or defend strategic points from the opposition. These points, such as iron mines or oil pumps, can provide resources for constructing more units or other facilities at the faction’s base, all in service of building a better army for further conquest.

Iron Harvest offers just enough of a technology tree to position the giant mechs and other upper-tier units as short-term rewards for economic growth, but there’s little beyond that for long-term fortification. This simplistic approach to the strategic layer, along with a population cap that limits the amount of units a faction can manage on the field, ensures that there is little-to-no reason for players to defensively “turtle” up in Iron Harvest. Here, success comes through aggression.

The missions in Iron Harvest‘s surprisingly traditional singleplayer campaign follow this philosophy, as enemy behaviors and mission structures are tightly scripted to encourage the player to keep pressing onward. It’s an approach that pairs well with the surprisingly potent writing and cutscene direction, giving the story a cinematic feel that I haven’t seen in the RTS genre for years.

The mechs of Iron Harvest also make a strong visual impression, frequently towering over the infantry and making a glorious mess of things as they barrel through small buildings and other bits of scenery. These smoking, hulking monstrosities are as imposing on the battlefield as they are in Różalski’s artwork, and the tenor of battle changes so dramatically once they enter the battlefield that the first faction to tech up to them tends to run away with an insurmountable advantage.

It’s in moments of imbalance like these when Iron Harvest begins to struggle.

Theoretically, the different classes of units form a rock-paper-scissors dynamic that should keep things in balance through careful asymmetric tuning, but it doesn’t hold up in practice. Flamethrower units are too effective at shutting down infantry and defensive placements, anti-armor units are too slow and too easily overwhelmed to effectively check a mechanized opposition, and defensive placements aren’t strong enough against specialized units to counterbalance their lack of mobility.

The actual on-field behaviors of the units themselves don’t help matters, as shaky pathfinding and strange scripting unite to form a frustrating combination. I found myself having to constantly babysit units through movements and special attacks since unattended squads would occasionally dive into cover right next to enemy units, fail to scatter from an incoming grenade or nervously shift around in open fire. Micromanagement is almost always a core pillar of skillful play in an RTS, but too much here is busywork instead of clever optimization.

Though I could not successfully find a multiplayer match through my review period, the skirmish modes demonstrate that the strategic AI in Iron Harvest has its own struggles in managing the battlefield.

The map designs for these skirmishes echo some of the more memorable environments of the campaign, but without the clever scripting of the campaign to guide enemy units into interesting moments on the battlefield, the AI often struggles to mount a compelling offensive on the default (Medium) difficulty level. Thankfully, the strengths of the campaign come back into play for the Challenge levels, where the player faces wave after wave of an enemy horde.

With one foot in classical RTS storytelling and the other in squad-based tactical strategy, Iron Harvest offers a take on the genre that doesn’t quite live up to Jakub Różalski’s evocative artwork. While the developers have already laid out a roadmap of updates that could potentially tighten up many issues with unit behavior and balance, the opportunity for a better future may already have passed.

Disclosures: This game is developed by KING Art and published by Deep Silver. It is currently only available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on PC. Approximately 35 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. During the review period, only ‘quick match’ multiplayer was available and no matches were available to be played for evaluation.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M with no descriptors. Blood sprays from wounded characters during tactical combat and rag-doll physics are used to embellish the violence of specific attack types, such as showing an arm being severed for an attack targeting that arm or awkwardly contorting a dead body after an explosive or concussive blast.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay and all voice acted text is accompanied by subtitles. There are no options to recolor text. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Controls are primarily mouse-driven, but all keyboard hotkeys are fully remappable.

HIGH Excellent emulation quality. Some great console rarities included.

LOW No supplemental material, no sound test mode.

WTF A Darius collection without Zuntata’s music front and center?!?

Describing Darius as a series of side-scrolling arcade shooters is like describing the Door to Hell in Turkmenistan as a big hole with some fire in it.

Thematically, Taito’s venerable franchise feels like the byproduct of a psychotropic haze — a surreal space odyssey that reframes the weightlessness of space as an ominous sea where enemy spaceships flutter among the stars like schools of jellyfish or giant cybernetic death-trout. Any semblance of coherent narrative is merely a suggestion in service of a more dream-like tone.

Since every element of the Darius games, from their bizarre visuals to the surreal synth-pop soundtracks, leaves a legacy as an alien experience in every sense of the word. Unfortunately, this means that the recent Cozmic Collection has a tall order ahead of it. Can this two-part anthology of arcade and console releases bring new players close enough to these classics to see the subtleties after twenty years of history has passed them by?

When it comes to gameplay, M2 does a remarkable job of showing how the franchise’s engineering pushed design boundaries in the arcade, with multiple arcade titles recreated with their complete multi-screen displays.

The original 1986 arcade version of Darius was released as a three-screen display and M2 ensures all three are here in loving detail, including the option to nudge the monitors slightly out of alignment as though the Switch was a well-worn arcade display. The extra real estate on the screen draws out the importance of managing distance to stay alive — since there are no screen-clearing bombs as a safety net and the player’s ship can only have so many bullets in play at a given time, their offensive capability relies on getting as close as possible to incoming enemies and drilling those cyborg jellyfish with rapid-fire assaults at point-blank range.

These design conceits would be carried forward and refined as Darius II in 1989, which was released as Sagaia in the West as the series’ first hit outside of Japan. There are more versions of Darius II in this collection than any other title, including a sprite-melting Sega Master System port that feels like it could have incinerated the original console hardware with extended play.

M2 preserves all the imperfections of these ports in loving detail, but their hard work only goes so far in telling the story. Sagaia is a fine entry, but a couple of blurbs of text on the game select screen fail to convey why its release warranted so many different revisions — and more importantly, why those revisions are worth playing now.

For players who aren’t as curious about multi-screen arcade cabinet design, 1996’s Darius Gaiden will stand out as the most exciting and accessible entry. Gaiden incorporates all the unique flavors of the series and focuses them into a conventional single-screen design, albeit one that’s rendered with the dazzling audiovisual reverie of Taito’s famous F3 System hardware. With G-Darius held back for a future collection, Gaiden is the best of this anthology, even though it’s presented as one more random game in a list.

This brings me back to one of the critical weaknesses of this package — other than reissuing these games, the Darius Cozmic Collection has virtually nothing else to offer. There are no museum-style supplemental materials that dive into how all this strange imagery and weird cabinet design came to fruition. No concept art or interviews.

The console ‘half’ of the collection suffers the most from this lack of context, with over half its entries being ports of arcade games found with greater fidelity in the arcade collection. The two console-exclusives – the SNES releases of Darius Twin and Super Nova – are hardly standouts for the franchise, leaving the rest of the console collection looking like ragtag b-sides.

Also, unbelievably, there’s virtually no mention anywhere of Zuntata, the famous Taito house band whose reputation arguably outstrips the Darius series that it called home for so many years. M2 smartly brings up a quick chyron with a song title whenever new music plays in the background of the arcade titles, but this music is good enough and weird enough to warrant its own special attention. The lack of a sound test or jukebox mode is a stunning miss.

While M2’s emulation work is spectacular as always, the Darius Cozmic Collection suffers from a failure of imagination. It envisions the history of this eclectic, evocative franchise as a commodity to be fastidiously repackaged and sold as’ content’ rather than taking the opportunity to explore and appreciate one of the strangest sagas in gaming. It’s a frustratingly narrow view that leaves the Darius story untold, and Taito has ensured that these collections will blend in with countless others on a shelf, struggling to be found in the crowded marketplace.

*

Disclosures: This game is developed by M2 and published by Taito. It is currently available on Switch and PS4. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on Switch. Approximately 6 hours of play were devoted to various single-player modes across all games in both collections, and one single-player session was completed (credit-fed clear for Darius Gaiden). No significant time was spent in multiplayer beyond confirming that all multiplayer modes are available as they were the original releases.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E due to Mild Fantasy Violence. This is collection of arcade-style games featuring spaceships shooting robotic fish. No official description was available for this collection, but the ESRB has rated various Darius titles in the past, here is an example: This is a side-scrolling shooter in which players guide a small spaceship through futuristic environments. Players shoot laser beams, missiles, and oversized bombs at waves of enemy ships and aquatic-themed bosses (e.g., walrus-, shark-, and squid-shaped robots). Enemies generally emit puffs of smoke and disappear in brief explosions when defeated.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay and all voiced text is accompanied by subtitles. There are no options to recolor text.

Remappable Controls: Control buttons are remappable from the options screen for each game in both collections.

HIGH Fantastic turn-based action, surprising punches of solid writing.

LOW Simplistic strategic layer, cautious tactical AI, strategic UI is rough.

WTF The emperor of the Holy Gustava Empire is named… Tim Gustav?

Every wargame’s original sin is a devotion to warfare that glorifies bloodshed. Many of the earliest titles understood this and narrowed their scope to leave no world outside of Gettysburg or the siege of Leningrad. However, there is no historical context for fantasy wargames such as Brigandine: Legend of Runersia, so a world must be built before it can be destroyed.

In the case of Brigandine, its central conflict mirrors the one that inspired Nobunaga’s quest to unify Japan, as six different nations make their play to conquer the continent of Runersia.

It’s the same concept that served as the foundation for the game’s spiritual predecessor in 1998’s cult classic Brigandine: The Legend of Forsena. Though the premise of ‘unifying the land’ isn’t a novel one, Brigandine justifies it through a sprawling web of relationships across all six of its fictional nations. Some are quaint, but there are enough serious ideological conflicts in play to give each one a distinctive flavor.

Brigandine carries those narratives onto the field through the concept of Rune Knights — unique ‘hero’ characters who lead monsters into battle. Since the Rune Knights are often plot-significant characters, they help anchor individual skirmishes to the overall storyline.

Players can deploy up to three Rune Knights into a battle and each one leads a squad of monsters. Squad composition is a critical — not only are there limits on which Rune Knights can be assigned, monsters lose effectiveness if they step outside their Rune Knight’s command range. If the Rune Knight is killed in battle, the whole squad is forced to retreat, making each one an appealing target on the battlefield.

The tension in squad arrangement and positioning pairs nicely with Brigandine’s usage of terrain modifiers and zone-of-control rules for character movement and attacks. Players can’t simply rush their units past the frontline to take out an opposing Rune Knight, nor can they dial up a long-range strike to snipe a critical unit across the field. No, close combat is the order of the day, with mages and archers having to work perilously close to the scrum to be in range of their targets. This friction helped keep battles exciting throughout the campaign.

Though I fell in love with the tactical battles, it’s what happens away from the battlefield that surprised me the most about Brigandine. The character-focused melodrama that typifies modern tactics titles like Fire Emblem is here, but it’s grounded in a surprising amount of introspection about the pursuit of power through conquest and what a nation’s destiny looks like when a war is over. Each faction in Runersia has their own angle of attack for that question, and through numerous vignettes their answers create a set of national identities that lend its war stories some weight. In particular, the final hours take a stunning amount of time and text to interrogate the concept of power as a gateway to corruption and subjugation.

After seeing the effort put into this examination of power, it’s disappointing that there isn’t a way to interact with competing nations other than to invade them. Players interested in sword-point diplomacy won’t be fazed, but the depth of Brigandine’s lore suggests a world that could offer a richer variety of strategic outcomes.

Despite this missed opportunity, the strategy mechanics do a decent job of testing the player’s understanding of managing choke points and troop levels across multiple battlefronts on a Risk-style map, even if the UI for wrangling those troops is counter-intuitive and clunky at times.

In the end, Brigandine: Legend of Runersia is one of the finest turn-based wargames on consoles in years. The concepts aren’t necessarily new or even deep compared to others in the genre, but they are masterfully rendered in service of a narrative that brings wargaming’s original sin forward into a harsh light.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Matrix Software and published by Happinet. It is currently only available on Switch. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the Switch. Approximately 55 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed twice (Guimoule on Easy difficulty in 30 hours, Mirelva on Normal difficulty in 25 hours). There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T due to Fantasy Violence, Mild Blood, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol and Tobacco. The official ESRB description reads as follows:  This is a turn-based strategy game in which players assume the role of one of six warring nations vying for power in a fantasy world. Players organize platoons of knights and monsters, move them around a grid-based battlefield, and select attack moves/tactics/skills from a menu. During battle phases, small figures are depicted attacking each other with magic, bites, and weapons (e.g., swords, axes). Cutscenes depict additional instances of violence: a still image of bound prisoners; a commander lying on the floor after being poisoned—both scenes depict small splashes of blood on the screen after characters are injured. Several female characters/monsters wear low-cut, skimpy outfits that reveal large amounts of breasts/cleavage. Characters are sometimes seen drinking alcohol and/or discussing drinking (e.g., “Sometimes you just want to drown that answer in alcohol”; “With that, Stella tossed back her last shot of rum…”). In one sequence, a character is depicted smoking a pipe.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no required sound cues for gameplay and all voice-acted text is accompanied by subtitles. There are no options to recolor text.

Remappable Controls: Controls are not remappable and there are no options for additional control setups.