HIGH A gripping, expertly-framed first-person sci-fi adventure.

LOW Polish issues and rough edges in the climax and finale make for an awkward landing.

WTF How did this story come out in 1964 and manage to still feel as timely as it does?

The key art for Starward Industries’ The Invincible shows an unfortunate astronaut buried up to their neck in sand on a desolate desert planet, skin and tissues rotted away to reveal the skull underneath. Looking at this art without any prior knowledge of the game or its inspirations, one might think The Invincible is a science fiction-themed horror title, or even a harsh survival simulator set on a distant world. Luckily for me, The Invincible is neither. Instead, it’s a rather compact, engrossing, and almost perfectly delivered first-person sci-fi adventure.

The Invincible is based on Polish author Stanisław Lem’s 1964 novel of the same name, but it isn’t a direct adaptation. Where the original tale focused on the titular vessel — a heavily-armed military spaceship — Starward Industries opts to reframe the story on a more personal scale. In Starward’s version of the story, the protagonist, Yasna, is a biologist instead of a soldier, part of a small, six-person research crew. She wakes up on the surface of a barren, foreboding planet with gaps in her memory and her journal to fill the blanks. Yasna must find the rest of her crew and reestablish contact with Novik, the mission commander in orbit onboard their mother ship. During this journey she’ll uncover why she and the crew were separated, and how their troubles relate to the planet and its mysterious, dangerous ecosystem.

Players will go about solving that mystery in the manner of a first-person exploration game — the kind some jokingly call “walking simulators”. In its opening moments, The Invincible gestures convincingly to the minutiae of survival simulators by having Yasna check her spacesuit for damage, carefully doing an inventory of her backpack, and perusal of her mission log, giving herself (and the player) an initial set of objectives. However, these actions are less an introduction to a set of gameplay systems (such as maintaining hunger or oxygen supplies) than a way to establish Starward Industries’ expertise at first-person navigation and immersive presentation. Other than a few small HUD elements to help players orient themselves, almost all functions are represented diegetically by using objects or mechanisms in the world of the game rather than abstractions.

Need to navigate? Yasna will open up her log, turning the pages to represent different sectors on the map grid. Need to find landmarks to pinpoint a landing zone for the mother ship’s evacuation capsule? Yasna’s telescope has separate “dials” for distance and zoom. Notes and waymarkers appear marked in bright yellow pencil on the map. All of this is couched in a sublimely appealing retro-futuristic visual style inspired by the Cold War-era space race art and concepts from the Soviet side of the divide. There’s a chunky, weighty physicality to every object and animation that matches or exceeds even the likes of triple-A behemoths like Cyberpunk 2077 in making a player feel like they’re inhabiting the viewpoint character. If you’re like me and love to look at vintage appliances or appreciate consoles covered in old LEDs and switches, knobs, and dials, The Invincible‘s chunky, grounded aesthetic sense is as intoxicating as catnip.

Starward Industries knows what it’s doing when it comes to looks and sounds, too. The synth-heavy soundtrack puts a haunting CRT TV hum behind every vista, and every vista looks like the cover of a weathered sci-fi paperback novel, not to mention the fact that the Soviet-era origins of both the story and the style are fresh and new compared to the endlessly reiterated versions of American retro-futurism envisioned by the likes of Fallout and old sci-fi TV reruns. The Invincible genuinely feels like a vision of an alternative future grown from different roots than the “typical” titles one might encounter growing up in the English-language gaming scene.

Where The Invincible is heavy on style, it’s deliberately light on gameplay systems. Rather than distract from the story by having to maintain vitality meters or batteries, Yasna’s main jobs are to explore each area, uncovering clues and slowly moving along with the pace of the narrative. While I won’t reveal specific plot points, the script does feel a little quaint. Starward Industries’ take on the original The Invincible‘s themes of robotic advancement, artificial evolution, and the relationship of humanity to future alien environments is well-executed, but doesn’t fundamentally challenge or alter them significantly, making the beats come across as a bit easy to predict, even without having read the source material.

That said, the alternative framing does a fantastic job of making the experience of those predictable beats land close to home. With players never leaving Yasna’s viewpoint, it’s good that she’s a personable and engaging lead, and the solitude of being marooned on an alien world is alleviated by Novik, a radio voice in Yasna’s ear. As Yasna travels the planet in search of her crew and and some answers, she can discuss various topics with him while players are usually given agency in deciding Yasna’s attitude. Yasna isn’t a blank slate protagonist, and the writing works to make her a convincing driver for much The Invincible‘s ten- to fifteen-hour runtime.

I say “much”, because things hit rougher patches in the last couple of hours of the journey, unfortunately.

As the story closes out, I couldn’t help but wonder if Starward Industries was forced to compromise on scenes or gameplay sequences that could’ve formed useful connective bridges for some of the logical leaps Yasna takes as the tale reaches its climax.

As things begin to draw near their conclusion, Yasna becomes something of an exposition device, spouting long, awkward monologues full of expertise outside the field of a biologist — or worse, calling on knowledge or speculations that she didn’t seem to know or encounter earlier. If the first three quarters of The Invincible come across as a well-paced sci-fi yarn, its last quarter feels haunted by the ghost of a producer telling the rest of the team to wrap it up. This abruptness wouldn’t be so bad if the rest wasn’t so good at delivering its slow-burn story in every other instance, but it’s disappointing to see the story stumble in the last few paces before the finish line.

An undercooked ending doesn’t capsize the rest of the experience, though, which is ultimately a perfectly calibrated sci-fi adventure with an inimitable aesthetic sense. As a game, The Invincible may not be entirely unassailable, but its credentials are as solid as one could ask for.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Starward Industries and published by 11 Bit Studios. It is currently available for the PS5, XBS/X and PC. This review of the game is based on a review build provided by the publisher and reviewed on PS5. Approximately 11 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, discovering multiple endings. There is no multiplayer mode. The game was completed.

Parents: This game is rated M by the ESRB, with content descriptors for Strong Language and Violence. The description is as follows: “This is a story-driven adventure game in which players assume the role of a scientist searching for her missing crew. From a first-person perspective, players traverse an alien terrain, engage in radio chatter, and interact with robots and drones to uncover mysterious events. Some interactions with robots can lead to instances of violence: a robot destroyed by a cannon blast; a character nearly crushed by a walking tank. Comic-style prints also depict violent imagery: humans getting shot by lasers; robot blasts melting through flesh; a surrendering character disintegrated by energy beams. The word “f**k” is heard in the game.”

Colorblind Modes: The game has no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: Voiced dialogue is accompanied by subtitles (see examples below), however, some subtitles showed discrepancies between the wording of the voiced line in English and the written text onscreen. The game features text size options, and highlights handwritten text and notes in computer font for readability. All gameplay cues are visual. Fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: This game’s button controls are not remappable.

HIGH The first sight of the colony’s oxygen engine.

LOW Trying to figure out how to back eject from an ice climb on a sharp time limit.

WTF The ships still have fuel enough to launch?

The modern media landscape being what it is, I’m never surprised to see a sequel. Often, though, I ask myself whether a particular one is necessary.

Deliver Us the Moon, a perfectly good game about a lonely effort to revive a lunar power station, didn’t seem to be crying out for one, even though the villains’ departure on an obviously-doomed planetary colonization mission was a clear hook. As it happens, the developers took the bait, and the story continues now in Deliver Us Mars.

Much has changed this time around. I felt that Moon suffered from the silence and general disembodiment of its main character, as well as the absence of other individuals to interact with. In  Mars the protagonist is vocal and numerous characters are frequently on screen, albeit somewhat stiff-faced. If anything, the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction, as Mars has a bit too much chatter and far too many flashbacks.

Unfortunately, the expanded dialogue mainly reveals that many of Deliver Us Mars’ characters are completely insufferable, including those clearly intended to be sympathetic. The protagonist, Kat, is perhaps not the worst, but she’s introduced to us as a child willfully destroying a toy just given to her by her father, and this foolhardy self-centeredness ends up driving much of the plot.

Of course in a game in which the Earth is suffering a climate catastrophe, there’s plenty of willful destruction to go around. Deliver Us Mars is a depressing experience, devoid of optimism for either the potential for colonizing space, or our chances of rescuing the Earth.

As the title suggests, the fleeing scientists of the first game decided to make their new home on Mars, a location not clearly superior to the Moon as a potential home. Their efforts have gone both better and worse than expected. The terms of the story and of Kat’s connection to one of the colonists require that the scientists have, without support from Earth, developed functional industry on an alien planet at a pace that beggars belief, which is just one of the plot’s many striking implausibilities.

A game of this kind tends to fill those holes by dotting its levels with bits of lore, and Kat can find holograms and snippets of text. Yet, it feels like there’s frustratingly little to glean even from surroundings that should be data-rich. This leaves gaps in the story, like how anyone came to think that sending four people to bring back three giant, possibly unfueled spaceships was going to work.

As it happens, the task involves a lot of walking. Much time is spent in plodding traversal, occasionally spiced up by floaty drives in a rover that handles like the second coming of Mass Effect’s Mako. Outdoors, Kat has a time limit on her oxygen, although thankfully the devs eschew Moon’s habit of strewing areas with canisters containing ridiculously tiny quantities of oxygen to extend the timer. The limit rarely matters except when Deliver us Mars asks her to do a bit of rock (or ice) climbing.

The climbing approach is fairly standard. Kat has a pick in each hand controlled by a mouse button or trigger. Holding down that control slams the pick in, releasing it allows her to reposition it. It’s all right as far as it goes, but rock-climbing feels like a mechanic in search of a purpose. The developers gamely keep trying to supply one, but however many platforming challenges Kat encounters, each scenario seems modified to suit the climbing, rather than the climbing being a natural solution to any problems the story poses.

There are also puzzles to solve in the form of routing power beams (generally for opening doors) and positional tasks that are used to unlock holograms. I did not find these to be interesting but at least they, unlike the climbing, felt like they belong.

The sense of story being divorced from events is further accentuated in sequences where Kat is asked to perform tasks related to spacecraft launch. As a highly trained astronaut, Kat should know exactly what to do, but as a player I was forced to scan around until I found an active control panel, figure out how to use it, then carry out a request. None of this was particularly difficult (and at least it fit the context) but it accentuated the divide between the character and me, not least when I was asked to slide forward a throttle and did this while Kat’s immobile hand was visible elsewhere onscreen.

Deliver Us Mars demands a sequel, in the sense that it artlessly uses a couple of post-credits scenes to set one up, but there’s nothing here that left me wanting more. Its puzzles are rather dull and the most notable gameplay activity, rock-climbing, feels like it belongs in an entirely different game. I don’t care for most of the characters that survived Deliver Us Mars’ sloppy, facile plot, and its scenario is hopeless and depressing. A third installment may be inevitable, but I’m not eager for that package to arrive.

Rating: 5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by KeokeN Interactive and published by Frontier Foundry.It is currently available on Windows PC, PS4/5, and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via the publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows X PC equipped with a AMD Ryzen 2700X processor, an ASRock X470 motherboard, 32 GB RAM , and a single GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card using driver 531.29. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Mild Blood and Violence. Per the ESRB: “This is an action-adventure game in which players assume the roles of astronauts investigating a lost colony on Mars. From first- and third-person perspectives, players explore spacecrafts and colonies, solve puzzles, and avoid hazards (e.g., electrical bursts). As players progress, they can unlock journal entries depicting holographic images of violence/peril: colonists suffocating to death; characters sucked into space as a result of a terrorist attack. One sequence depicts an exploding space craft, with a woman left on board. Some scenes depict human corpses scattered across facilities, including a man with blood on his face.”

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. However, they cannot be altered or resized. During the course of play, there are several noises that are important, for instance a chirp indicating that another quarter of the oxygen tank has been used or an alert from the that a collectible has been identified. Although there are visual counterparts for these noises I noticed that the sounds were more accurate about status and directed me to search areas I had otherwise ignored. I believe the game will be more difficult without the assistance of sound.

Remappable Controls: On PC, this game offers fully remappable controls, but I have seen complaints that this is not true on other platforms. Players on console might want to investgate before a purchase.

HIGH Using air strikes to absolutely crush a monstrous boss.

LOW Getting the same convoy defense mission for the 20th time.

WTF Oh, so the zombie biomass is thinking now? Fantastic news!

Putting characters in a hopeless situation is a perfect way to establish stakes. People who desperately need to win but knowing they likely won’t make it is a strong way to hook an audience, and this is exactly where Red Solstice 2 starts.

The opening is one of the most dramatic tutorials I’ve ever encountered. The Martian province of Tharsis is completely overrun by mutant zombies. The player takes on the role of the Executor, a genetically-engineered cyborg tasked with leading a team of soldiers on a suicide mission to activate the solar cannon, an orbital weapon that will destroy the colony, killing millions of people and tens of millions of zombies. While the player is learning how to control their squad and interact with the world, they’ve got a horrible countdown in the back of their minds — each completed objective brings them one step closer to the end of this suicide mission, and the Executor doesn’t have an escape plan once the solar cannon is triggered.

After the colony is gone and the tutorial ends, the game opens up and reveals its main influence. RS2 owes a huge amount to the original XCOM — from the globe with different regions where missions can crop up, to the research bay where weapons are developed and corpses are dissected, to the main authority that periodically refreshes their resources, everything outside of the combat missions is a loving tribute to one of the best titles ever made. Instead of building a base, the player is equipped with a giant land ship that serves as a headquarters. It can move slowly around the planet, unlocking new regions where missions can take place, and building outposts to improve the various items they receive during the weekly resupply.

Most of the story in Red Solstice 2 is told via documents in the world map’s archives section, or through NPC conversations that the player — a freshly-built Executor taking over for the one who got cooked in the tutorial — eavesdrops on via the communications systems. While it’s a fairly rote tale, the game manages to keep the bleak tone going without becoming too oppressive. There are even a couple of moral decisions they’ll have to make over the course of the campaign, in which they’re given the opportunity to gain an advantage against the endless hordes of zombies at the cost of many human lives. There’s no easy answer or obvious reward for prioritizing survivors over winning the war, and in fact, the Red Solstice 2 often makes the argument that being kind is a fool’s choice, since losing the war means the complete extinction of humanity.

Red Solstice 2‘s tactical combat mechanics are well-designed. The player uses a mouse to move the Executor and their team of up to three marines around the map. The marines automatically fire at any threat to defend themselves and the player can decide between letting the Executor fire freely, or manually controlling shooting themselves. This isn’t just a question of playstyle preference, though — manual shooting has an increased rate of fire over automatic, so in hectic swarm battles or boss fights, jumping in and controlling the action is a huge advantage.

The Executor is extremely moddable. As the player levels them up, they’ll unlock a variety of powers that can be mixed and matched in the pre-combat loadout screen. This lets players decide whether they want to focus on defense and healing their troops, or to put all their focus on becoming a grenade-tossing creature of vengeance. This feature becomes especially useful in multiplayer. While someone playing solo can only bring three AI marines on missions, playing online raises the squad cap to eight, giving seven other players the chance to help out and grind a little experience for their characters. Neither way of playing is an obviously better one, though — team players will find that missions are much easier with a few extra hands, while solo players get a huge advantage in that AI marines have unlimited ammunition.

Red Solstice 2 only has one significant flaw, but it’s a pretty big one — there’s not enough variety in missions. There are plenty of story missions, but the vast majority of missions the player will take on are randomly-generated jobs where they grab supplies, lower planetary infection levels, or recruit new specialists so they can build enhancements to their landship. The problem is that there aren’t enough types of missions, and they get repetitive incredibly quickly.

The mission types basically boil down to search locations, escort VIPs, or blow up an area. Red Solstice 2 tries to mix things up by changing where the missions happen on the map and by having optional side-missions pop up while the player is busy doing something else, but these tweaks are incredibly limited as well. By the time I was ten hours in, I’d seen nearly everything the mission generator had to offer. I kept playing because the story interested me and the play is solid, but the only innovations that crop up before credits roll are a few new enemy types from time to time.

Red Solsitce 2 is a bleak ordeal, but it’s not without its charms. There’s a real sense of frantic desperation created as the player scrambles desperately from one mission to the next, helplessly watching the global infection meter always climbing. Whether it’s zombie biomass, sinister corporations, or environmental catastrophe, for the entirety of Red Solstice 2′s play time I was sure that we were only ever a hair’s breadth away from extermination — which only served to make fighting against it feel all the more satisfying. If the developers could ease the repetitiveness from their random mission generator, this would be one of the best successors to XCOM’s legacy, but in its current state it’s just an extremely solid squad-based RTS.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ironward and published by 505 Games. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 45 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. Two hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: The game was not rated by the ESRB, but it contains Blood and Gore and Extreme Violence. This is a game about space marines blasting former humans to pieces. Not safe for kids at all. Also, there’s plenty of mass murder (for a supposedly good purpose) and human experimentation in the story.

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. I played most of the game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: There is no controller diagram. No, this game’s controls are not remappable. The game is played with a mouse and keyboard, with the mouse selecting options and directing troop movement, while the keyboard offers shortcuts to speed up certain actions.

Red Solstice was a high-quality squad-based mouselook shooter set on Mars, in which the player controlled marines attempting to survive a monster apocalypse. They had to explore a fallen colony while teaming up with AI marines to battle zombies and mutants while securing technology and making good their escape. In addition to a stellar solo mode, it allowed up to four players to team up online in campaign or skirmish modes together. In developing Red Solstice 2, the developers have really dug in on the multiplayer aspect, refining the hybrid shooter/RTS.

When played alone, the player is put in charge of a squad made up of a specialist (the main character) and a team of three other space marines. They can fight on their own terms, or positioned in real-time, depending on the player’s preference.

In the mission I sampled, it reminded me of Starcraft missions where a team of soldiers had to work their way through enemy bases while setting up chokepoints to take on enemy swarms. It’s satisfying — the AI teammates are smart and effective once put in place, and watching zombies getting torn apart by futuristic firearms never gets old. I’m psyched to get some time with the actual multiplayer as well, since up to 8 players will be able to co-op missions to make harder difficulty levels more manageable.

Another big selling point for RS2 is the world map, from which the player’s campaign is planned. Taking a cue from classic XCOM, players are giving a diagram of Mars and presented with random events they can choose to intervene in. Sometimes they’re just a matter of a text box popping up and describing the resources players discovered, and sometimes they’re hordes of monsters which need to be destroyed. This map gives players a chance to see the alien infestation spread across Mars and choose the best way to fight back against it. Likewise, they’ll be asked to develop new tech and to train their soldiers to ensure that they’re constantly upping their fighting abilities as the story marches forward.

With a huge variety of character classes, weapon variants, and mission types, Red Solstice 2: Survivors has pushed the series fully into the strategy genre. While players will still be able to get that classic mouselook shooter action any time they want by jumping into the shoes of the main character on their own, the heart and soul of the experience is now building a fireteam, working out a strategic approach to a situation, and managing characters to make sure they’re fighting at the highest possible level. It’s going to be very interesting once the finished version is available!

HIGH Minigun+Autotargeting = Hordekiller.

LOW Any of the boss fights.

WTF The mini-nukes are safe to detonate so long as I’m exactly halfway inside the blast radius.

There’s a hard and fast rule when it comes to shooter design, one that developers break at their peril — If there are unlimited enemies, there must be unlimited ammunition.

There are a number of ways to bend this rule. Certain levels can be themed around escape, for example, with the player expected to flee from a neverending horde of foes. Developers can also make enemies constantly drop ammunition, transforming killing and resource gathering into a single activity. A game with infinite enemies and incredibly small amounts of ammo, though… that would be madness, unless a developer was trying to build an entirely new kind of shooter, with a completely original mechanic designed to make this kind of insanity playable.

That’s what Solstice Chronicles: MIA is, of course. It offers a new concept in the world of twin-stick shooters by asking the players to manage their difficulty level like any other resource. That sounds strange and the game doesn’t explain it very well in the four tutorial levels — I was a full third of the way through the campaign before I was truly confident about what I was supposed to be doing. Once I’d wrapped my head around it, however, I was able to appreciate it for what it is – a mechanic that complicates and deepens the twin-stick genre like no other before it.

Players take control of a marine cut off from his unit during a mutant outbreak on Mars. His goal? Partner up with a likable AI drone, figure out where the mutant virus is coming from, and escape with a cure. There are a wide variety of environments, and an RPG-lite system that lets players unlock weapons and powers with skillpoints they earn by beating levels. This is all pretty standard fare, and Solstice MIA‘s writing is good enough to create a sense of building threat and momentum over the course of the story. It also has solid art design. The power-armored marines move with an authentic clunkiness, and the various mutant types, from the lowly facehugger all the way up to giant sandworms, are suitably creepy and disgusting.

The real star of the show, however, is the ‘Threat’ system that Solstice MIA is built around. At all times the player has an indicator letting them know what the maximum number of enemies that can spawn at the current moment is. As enemies run up and are gunned down, new ones are spawned out of zones marked by green smoke. Making progress through the levels and killing certain foes will raise the maximum spawn limit over and over again until a constant stream of enemies are rushing towards the player. The only way to survive is to learn various systems of threat management.

The player’s drone buddy has four different powers — two that raise the threat level, and two that lower it. When the drone is out digging up more ammo or detonating a micro-nuke, the threat goes up. When it makes a shield or taunts foes, the maximum threat goes down. These powers are notable for how well-balanced they are. An infinitely-recharging screen-clearing bomb sounds way too powerful, but if using it only brings more enemies, it’s actually more about buying a brief respite rather than wiping out entire levels.

However, the two threat-lowering technologies are where the real inspiration shines. Players can only lower the threat by either summoning the shield, or calling every enemy to attack simultaneously with the taunt command. This forces players to learn the layout of levels, pick defensible chokepoints that they can hold, and battle the hordes on their own terms. Success in here isn’t about killing everything, because players never can- – it’s about players picking their moment and luring foes into fights that they can’t win. It’s a layer of strategy that I was never expecting to see in a twin-stick shooter, and it works incredibly well.

…It works in most levels, anyhow. Solstice MIA‘s biggest flaw is that the devs can’t make their innovative new concepts work in every situation. Specifically, the boss fights are the game’s low point. When players can move around large, multi-tiered levels full of obstructions and corridors to use against their foes, things are great. It’s less impressive when they’re dropped into arenas and expected to battle fast and deadly bullet sponges that are relentlessly chasing them. All of the battles are winnable (the mini-nuke will ensure that, if used correctly) but the devs haven’t found a way to make the boss fights as innovative and engaging as the rest of the campaign, and they suffer by comparison.

Solstice Chronicles: MIA is a breath of fresh air in the twin-stick shooter genre. The threat system makes it feel like nothing else out there, transforming it from just another run-and-gun into something far more strategic and complex. It’s not a complete success, but it manages to add a satisfying amount of strategy without skimping on the action, which is a feat that I’m shocked no one has managed before. The ending promises a sequel, and I can only hope that the developers work the bugs out of their concept by then so that they can establish this as a whole new subgenre of the twin-stick shooter. Rating: 8 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Ironward and published by Nkidu. It is currently available on PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 2 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was not reviewed by the ESRB, but it contains violence and strong language. The game is firing assault rifles at evil mutants. There’s essentially no content other than violence, although little of it is so traumatic that it should give any but the youngest players pause.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are very few audio cues in the game, and even when they don’t have accompanying visual cues, they shouldn’t provide too much trouble. All dialogue is subtitled.

Remappable Controls: Yes, this game offers fully remappable controls.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.