+ PvPvE with great visual design. A solid gameplay loop with great balance versus both AI and other players. It’s fun, especially with friends!

- The UI is inconsistent from screen to screen. Especially on controller with different buttons used to change sections, and sometimes no buttons available at all to change sections. Technical issues on older hardware; had to use a launch option to disable multithreading, dialing back performance in order to prevent unbearable audio stuttering.

Destiny refuge here. That, and Deep Rock Galactic, those are my two evergreen multiplayer games of choice. I am, however, looking towards new horizons…

Wildgate plays a bit like Gambit sweats invading Sea of Thieves, but it’s set in a battleroyale. In space. And, it’s actually a mod for Overwatch, the devs now trying to go legit on Steam.

Wildgate is built on Unreal, and it does that *Fortnight* thing: Immense multiplayer world, with a lot of physic sims. The ships are their own, intricate combat spaces. And there are four of them cruising around a densely packed pocket of space. Pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥’ cool, right?

The encounters throughout the map have a design to them, with combat spaces and light mechanics for your team to solve. They are pretty simple, so far, but the devs say that they plan to add more soon.

Popping through an Ancient Portal to find the enemy team running what feels like Strike is so cool. So is sneaking aboard their ship and stealing all their gear, or even their Artifact. Maybe set their reactor to blow on the way out.

I really dig Wildgate. It's a little rough, but mostly, it just needs more players. Players willing to spend a few hours learning how it all works, and ones willing to communicate with others aboard their ship. Few randos seem willing to hop on comms, which is unfortunate for them, and their teammates. That ragtag group does not really stand much of a chance up against basically any ship crewed by a squad with all four players on comms.

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I am not familiar with the project’s history, but the devs seem to be doing a last-minute pivot away from a battlepass, of sorts, and towards a sustainable monetization agreement like that of Deep Rock Galactic.

It’s not going F2P (yet) and instead, they are building some sort of “free trial.”

Right on. ♥♥♥♥ F2P, that’s not a sustainable or fair business model.

While exploring a remote canyon in Hoxxes IV, mountaineer and adventurer Talking Wires (Ben A--------) becomes trapped when a boulder falls on his arm. Over the next five days, Wires examines his life and considers his options, leading him to an agonizing choice: to amputate his arm so that he can extricate himself and try to make his way back to the Space Rig or remain pinned to the canyon wall and likely die. Based on Wires’s book, Between a Rock and a Stone.

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127 hours on Steam, double that on Playstation, and I believe Deep Rock Galactic remains one of best multiplayer experiences of all time. Its strengths are the variety of missions and playstyles, gameplay that fosters cooperation, and some sweet procedural generation algorithms.

The gameplay loop is this: Four Dwarves drop into a cave deep inside the planet Hoxxes IV. The players must get their bearings, navigate the dark and winding tunnels using a variety of tools, fend off waves of swarming six-legged monstrosities while completing one or more mission objectives, then escape back to a Drop Pod. The fun comes from each Dwarf’s unique arsenal of weapons and tools, and the tension between moments of quiet exploration and frantic fights for survival.

The game’s longevity comes from the variety of build crafting and missions the developers added over the years, its friendly community, and varied gameplay. Its goofy sense of humor and overly enthusiastic voice lines from each Dwarf puts a bow on it. Oh, and if the mention of “seasons” on the store page puts you off, know that these function more like free expansions. Each added new missions, enemies, and rewards. They are all free and fully integrated into the game, and players can choose any of the “season passes” released to date and work through the reward tracks at their leisure.

The unsung strength of Deep Rock Galactic is the procedural generation assembling each mission. Figuring out how to navigate the dark tunnels of Hoxxes IV is half the fun. Not only does each biome offer unique hazards and obstacles, but the way the procedural generation puts everything together varies, too. The wide, sloping halls of the Sandblasted Corridors play quite differently from the twisted verticality of the Dense Biome, and that gives each dwarf’s traversal methods time to shine. There’s something really satisfying about entering an encounter with the space looking like a nightmare to navigate, then leaving with the room terraformed by Driller tunnels, terraced by Engineer platforms, and crisscrossed with Gunner ziplines.

Even more satisfying is that frantic scramble back to Drop Pod after completing the mission objective. The cavern walls shaking, bugs swarming out from every hole, and teammates assisting their fallen comrades. There’s nothing quite like it. Deep Rock Galactic is one of all-time greats. You’ll love it.

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With that preamble out of the way, I can’t feel my beard, help! Come and rescue me!

No Way Home is a twin-stick shooter with light exploration elements and looting. The combat has a few unique twists, like a grappling hook you can use to pull health kits over from behind cover and an overheat mechanic you can mitigate by moving your ship up against icy asteroids.

The marketing presents it like an open world, but really, you are just driving from one mission checkpoint to the next. There's not much to see along the way, just tiled assets drawn into tepid labyrinth on a gradient map and clusters of enemies that drop crafting materials or upgrades.

Speaking of which, there is such a thing as too much loot. Each encounter showers you with and endless assortment of guns, shields, and reactors for both you and your AI companion, and I found myself spending as much time in the menus as in-game. No Way Home’s mobile roots are most apparent here, as the UI makes sorting through all this more difficult than it ought to be. New items are inevitably placed aaaalll the way at the bottom of each list, and you must select each one to compare it what you have equipped. Dismantling stuff is especially painful, requiring you to first select the time, press the “Dismantle” button, then press a “Confirm” button located in another location onscreen. Since you find new gear so often, and it is almost always better than what you can craft, I stopped engaging with the system.

There is a story, but it’s Saturday morning cartoon drivel with obnoxious characters. The voice acting is strange. The aliens’ voice lines seem as if directed in a vacuum, free from the context of what the text actually says. Thankfully, you can turn off the voice acting, but that does not stop the endless barks from your character, your AI companion, enemies, and radio chatter from popping up to obscure much of the screen during the middle of combat.

No Way Home isn’t a bad game, but it is not a particularly great one, either. I wouldn’t bother.

This is a great game! Nova Drift is essentially Asteroids—momentum based, single screen with wraparound—with waves of enemies, bosses, upgrade trees, and a techno-neon sheen. The game is laser-focused on a specific experience and does it extraordinarily well. Is it for you? Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you like your space games with conservation of momentum? Do you dislike ones where the player is essentially a turret, stopping on a dime and turning any direction instantaneously? Were games like Asteroids, Gravitar, or Subspace your jam back in the day?
  
• Do you like build-crafting and upgrade trees? How about unlocking upgrades?
  
• Does the concept of a bullet hell game appeal to you, but all the ones you tried required a bit too much precision and memorization?
  
• Do you dig games where you can achieve a flow state, where conscious thought fades and you just zone out, operating almost instinctually?
  
• Do electronic music and pulsating lights help you enter such a state?
  
• Did you ever hang out in arcades, chasing a high score?

If you answered most of those in the affirmative, you’ll dig Nova Drift. No technical issues to report, and really no nitpicks, either. If you are on the fence, why not give the demo a whirl?

Hyperspace Dogfights might be a fun game, but is so mired by issues that I ended up refunding it.

1. It won’t run as anything but a bordered window. No fullscreen, no fullscreen windowed. The window does not even have a custom program icon, nor is affected by system color settings. Just a bright, white, and distracting bar atop the game at all times.
   
2. The scaling of text and UI elements is both arbitrary and inconsistent. At 4K resolution, the tutorial text is illegible without leaning in towards my monitor and squinting. Yet, the text related to gameplay is so large and blocky that it’s distracting. The UI elements during gameplay are too small to parse, yet those within the menus are enormous. While it is possible to scale some of these elements, doing so pushes parts of them offscreen and breaks some sections of the menu.
   
3. The menus are only navigable by using the mouse. But not the main menu, that can only be navigated by the keyboard and is brought up by pressing Escape. Clicking on the menu icons does nothing.
   
4. Controller support is abysmal. An Xbox controller was not autodetected. After activating it manually, none of the buttons were bound I had to bind each and every one manually. The game does helpfully show an image of suggested bindings, provided you have not scaled the UI up too high to push some of it offscreen. There are no icons or proper names for buttons. Instead, they are cryptically referred to with terms like -AxisPovX or B7 or +AxisZ in both the menus and UI elements. During the tutorial, inputs at various points are sometimes referred using these names, or the keyboard inputs, or sometimes even both. By the end of the tutorial I was mashing all four face buttons to proceed because I couldn’t remember which one was B0, B1, B2, or B3 and different sections required different inputs.
   
5. The game has serious problems with visual hierarchy, color, and clutter. Elements in the background have stronger contrast and more visual detail than either the player or enemies. The clouds have a huge amount of contrast, and the sun behind them has even more. Sometimes, enormous, blocky text appears behind all that with such weight as to obscure everything else. Yet, text elements more important to gameplay—dodging, incoming fire, etc.—remain tiny no matter what the scaling, and with colors that blend into the background. The “pixel size” of the player, enemies, bullets, missiles, and various text elements are all different and inconsistent. The effect of all this is overwhelming visual noise, and not in a good way. I found it difficult to track the player amid all this and to parse incoming enemies and attacks. If you’ve studied art, graphic design, or even just remember opposing and complimentary colors from elementary school, Hyperspace Dogfights will likely frustrate you to no end.
   
6. The game was dropping frames when the action got heated. Yes, I tried adjusting the “hitlag amount,” which briefly pauses the action each time the player’s bullet connects. This appears to be technical issue, but I did not spend any time diagnosing it. (8th gen i5 CPU, 16gb RAM, GTX 2070 Super)
   
7. This is more subjective, but the sound effects and music were pretty basic. And playing with headphones, I did not notice much stereo separation or definition for the actions onscreen. Much like the visual elements, it seemed like a whole lotta noise.

Songs of Rats seems have been inspired by the choose-your-own-adventure books of yore, specifically the Fighting Fantasy series and Steve Jackson’s Starship Traveller. The player moves through text-based encounters, rolling their stats against those of hostile creatures and hazardous encounters.

Unfortunately, these text-based encounters lack any real descriptive flourishes to set the scene or spark your imagination. There is a sentence or two stating matter-of-factly the nature of the encounter, followed by another describing either your action or that of your opponent. And that’s the whole game, really. You’ll either succeed an encounter because your stats are high enough, or fail because they were too low. In a combat encounter, fights go back and forth until one side’s HP is whittled down to zero. There are no real decisions to be made here, and I was thoroughly bored by the half-hour mark.

Technically, the visuals are fine, if a little barebones. After each encounter, the merchant caravan card would briefly flash onscreen before clearing for the actual encounters available. There are only two music tracks. It would be generous to call them songs, they are more like ten-second loops. There are few sound effects. Controller support is rough. I had to hit the left bumper after every encounter for the left joystick to begin registering inputs again. The selection cursor would bug out, and inputs completely stopped registering after fifteen minutes.

I had high hopes for Songs of Rats, but after one playthrough of the demo, I don’t want to see any more.

A strong solo effort by Russian artist Artyom Trakhanov. The game's an old school choose-your-own-adventure, with a handy feature to quickly zip through paths already taken to find all the endings, and it takes about an hour to explore every path.

The story uses second-person narration to follow a hapless delivery driver having the worst day of their life. The writing's strong and describes the scenes in vivid, yet concise language punctuated by quick trips into your character's mind for extra effect. The dialogue sounds pretty natural, too, despite the author speaking ESL, but there are a few strange word choices. The whole story just kinda... pops. It's great!

So's the art, which showcases the author's graphic novel and game design chops. It's done in an MS Paint pixel style, and uses looping animation, reveals, quick changes, and overlaid panels throughout each scene, with the occasional sound effect thrown in for good measure. There's some real cinematic flair to this game!

If you're often disappointed by games' amateurish writing and hold Disco Elysium to be a high water mark of the medium, you'll dig this. If you like comic books with gritty, adult stories, you'll dig this. If you're on the fence and are the type of person that pays money for stories printed on paper, you'll dig this.

Disco Elysium is a story about the human condition and man’s place in a cold and uncaring universe, punctuated by humor, pathos, the absurd, and earnest sincerity. It may be my favorite videogame of all time.

The boundless creativity in the directions the story goes, the way the player can express themselves, and the pathos and humor throughout the story are unrivaled. The presentation is top-notch, with a strong visual and typographical language and subtle animations that guide one’s eye through the reams of written text. The voice acting is mostly great—your thoughts being a standout—although some characters have poor takes with odd emphasis or mispronounced words. And the world these characters inhabit is so fully realized one could almost imagine this was a real place, with even the littlest corners of the game unfolding strange and delightful vignettes that say something about the larger whole.

Technically, the game’s in great shape and I only encountered one progression-blocking bug that has since been patched. It plays great with a controller, too, and one can easily play from a comfy sofa, wrapping themselves up in this world like a comfy blanket. Highly recommended!

I had high hopes for Vagrus. I grew up reading the Fighting Fantasy Choose Your Own Adventure books, have sunk many hours into Failbetter Game's text adventure web browser game Fallen London, and played both games in their Sunless series. I also enjoy tactical and grand strategy games, ones like Crusader Kings and Stellaris. This is all to say, I‘m basically Vagrus‘ target demographic. So, why no recommendation?

Simply put, the writing in Vagrus isn‘t up to par. You know the term “programmer art?” It refers to art created during game development, out of necessity to serve as a placeholder. Well, Vagrus has “programmer writing” That is, text with no style or flair that merely exists to have *something* onscreen. How so? Many sentences have extraneous clauses, ones any editor would have struck from a first draft, and this feels like padding out a word count. The descriptions are either too vague, often failing to evoke sense of place. Or, they choose to focus on details irrelevant to the characters or actions happening in that particular scene. If I’m speaking to a character, describe how they move or the way their body language shifts when they disagree with what you have just said, not the knickknacks in the back of their shop. And every character you meet speaks with the same voice, often using modern phrasing or slang. The player character is written this way, too and is quoted, like the other characters, in third-person which is a strange choice.

Some of the writing comes across as needlessly snarky, too, instead of sincere. The phrasing can be flat-out weird at times, which might be a product of the authors speaking English as a second language, or relying on machine translations. Strange pop culture references to other media, like Star Wars, appear from time to time and they aren’t particularly welcome, either, just distracting. All in all, much of the writing feels like a rushed draft. Serviceable, but work that‘ll be edited and punched up later.

The presentation isn‘t doing it any favours, either. Typography is crucial for a game like this, but little care has been given to the typography in Vagrus. There might five or six differently-sized typefaces onscreen at once, with little visual hierarchy or consistency. Margins are too wide, with too many words per line, and are center justified. Tick marks are used instead proper quotation marks. The lack of any kerning creates rivers of distracting white space through the middle of paragraphs. It is all blasé and presented with seemingly little care, let alone style or flair.

Vagrus

Vagrus has some technical issues, too. UI elements occasionally fail to load, type scaling only affects some of the text in the game, and I experienced several minor bugs and two crashes. Fortunately, the developers have provided considerable post-launch support and do not seem adverse to reworking and improving existing systems. Not the writing though, as that is considered to be done. Even written in stone, you could say. So, even if the techincal and UI issues are be ironed out in the future, the clunky writing will remain. As it stands now, it‘s hard for me to recommend Vagrus.