Displaying items by tag: Early Access

Server-side problems is the biggest drag for BATTALION 1944 right now, yet it's evidence for how hungry players are for this shooter. This is a great Early Access title that feels balanced and has been created with care. So much is done right that the minor things wrong hardly matter.

Battery Jam is a competitive, local multiplayer title where you battle each other on a simple map to claim more tiles than your opponent(s). This is a great option in the genre. It’s simple, fun, and can be played in short periods of time. As long as you have controllers that are compatible with Battery Jam, it runs smoothly, without glitches.

Ultimately, Orch Star is a well-made title. You won’t encounter many bugs despite the Early Access sticker on the box, and the graphics are excellently rendered. If your only desire is to watch as a horde of betusked astronauts crush their enemies, this one is for you. Unfortunately, if your desire is to control a horde of betusked astronauts as they crush their enemies, then you will be left with little else to do but point-and-click.

Dusk is a nifty little shooter from the dawn of the FPS era, and while it feels like a long-lost DOS game that time forgot, it brings a fresh twist to the FPS table while reminding us why we fell in love with shooters in the first place. Guns are cool, levels are fun, enemies put up a good fight — and with the game being in Early Access, there’s more yet to come from this gem. It's a promising title with a bright future.

They Are Billions isn’t your father’s RTS. Sure, you still build a base and armies, but you don’t use them to go out and conquer your enemies. Instead, you minimax your way through, clinging to survival as “billions” of zombies assault your colony.

Although Next Up Hero is only entering early-access, it looks to have a promising future ahead of it. The gameplay may feel awkward with a keyboard and mouse, but using a third-party controller or the addition of cursor based aim/shooting would remedy that quickly. As it sits, the game does not feel as impossibly difficult as the developers want it to feel, but it has tons of potential to become an extremely challenging game. The aesthetics of the game are on point, and the RPG feel was done perfectly with enough twists to make it feel unique. With a strong development team, and plenty of community feedback, Next Up Hero has the potential to become a top indie game for 2018 upon its final release.

WARTILE is a creation that is meant to bridge the gap between a real time strategy and a tabletop games, with elements of card play mixed in. Figurine characters that you control begin scenarios on dioramas that are intricately designed and is comprised of many hexagonal tiles that characters move throughout. Each scenario has multiple objectives that are as simple as killing every enemy, and as complex as lighting tents on fire to prevent reinforcements, while also preventing an alarm from being sound when killing sleeping soldiers.

Medieval Kingdom Wars is a live action RTS with a heavy emphasis on siege battles. Despite added features it feels like a reskinned Medieval Total War 2, although the developers promise a new look at the RTS genre. In their defense, they have been great at updating Medieval Kingdom Wars and incorporating player suggestions, so it’s worth keeping an eye on as it continues through early access before its full release in mid 2018.

Welcome to the ARENA.... GODS, a title where you use anything and everything at your disposal to beat, slice, smash, stab, and pummel your way to victory. There are no fancy controls or tech skills you need to learn to be proficient at this game: you run, you attack, you roll. Sometimes you win; more often than not, you die. There is nothing keeping you playing in terms of story — because it does not have one — and while the gameplay is simple and fun, it is still simple, meaning that once you have played a few matches, you have experienced all that the Early Access title has to offer.

I’m sure you’ve already heard about DIE YOUNG, the visually impressive first person open world survival game set in an island in the Mediterranean Sea featured by Daphne, a brave heroine who tries to escape from this dangerous place.

If there’s one takeaway from Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof VR, it’s that you don’t need to be a AAA studio to develop an entertaining wave-shooter with solid production values. Guns’n’Stories doesn’t have the largest amount of content, and its two-handed weapons could use some fine-tuning, but the quality and experience, especially for the price, makes this title easy to recommend.

Fighting games are hard to access. The moves, the combos, reading (guessing the opponent's next move) all raise somewhat of a barrier for newcomers. How many times was I pinned down in the corner by Dhalsim, at a loss for how to break out of the combos the other player was laying on me?

Isn't it great? Party Hard Tycoon, developed by Pinokle Games, allows you to create, decorate, plan, run, over-hype, and manage your own themed parties. The themes range across the board — really — from a Vodka party to a Zoo Party. They even have themes for gamers, too, complete with arcade cabinets to fill your venue.

Starting today, publisher Insel Games hosts its final test weekend for their upcoming sci-fi action MMORPG Wild Buster: Heroes of Titan, adding new US servers as well as the “Squad League” PvP arena where players will be able to test their strength in 5 v 5 matches. Wild Buster: Heroes of Titan is scheduled to launch on Steam via Early Access later this year.

Early access games give developers and players a unique relationship as a game goes through early-to-final development stages. As a player, you don’t have to be among the select few for the game’s alpha and beta phases; you can play immediately and experience a new perspective as the developers continue to build and improve the game based on your feedback.

Black Day is an “Early Access” third person shooter with FPS elements.  Rather than focusing on a set story and setting, Black Day is a military sandbox where players change the parameters of their missions.  Featuring an experience-based progression system, Black Day rewards players for handicapping themselves via difficult obstacles with new equipment and maps.  Helios Productions self proclaims this title as “very ambitious,” promising that they only want to provide an excellent final product.  The promise of so many features, paired with the beauty of the Unreal Engine, begs the question; is it able to deliver on its ambition?

Solace Crafting may have its glitches, but it is still in the very early stages and has incredible amounts of promise already. It makes a place for itself in the genre, giving a minimalistic spin that not many others can match nearly as well. Such a zen game has a lot to offer, not only to the genre but to game libraries everywhere.

Former Mafia II, Mafia III and DayZ developer Jan Zelený partners with Excalibur to digitally distribute transport strategy game Mashinky. Developer Jan Zelený, who has previously worked as a programmer on Mafia II, Mafia III and DayZ, has teamed up with Excalibur Games to sell Mashinky.

The OPN interview with Deli Interactive. We Need to Go Deeper is a 2-4-player cooperative submarine roguelike set in a Verne-inspired undersea universe. In the game, you and your crew must embark on many voyages into a mysterious undersea trench known as The Living Infinite.

Tangledeep is like the platonic ideal of RPGs: it has everything you want in a dungeon crawling roguelike without all the mess of outdated graphics or frustrating UI. This gem evokes memories of 16-bit Super Nintendo RPGs from back in the day. Do yourself a favor, grab Tangledeep before it gets more popular, and just try it for a couple twenty hours. Did I mention there’s great replay value?