A new month means a new Humble Choice offering - and this has to be one of the more tempting ones we've seen for some time.

Members of Humble's gaming subscription service can get 12 games to keep forever this month, including Vampyr, Wargroove, Call of Cthulhu, Hello Neighbour and more for just £10/$12.

Dontnod's Vampyr is quite a good draw here as it hasn't been discounted this low until now. You will find it for under £10 on its own on the PSN Store right now, though.

Read more

Those with a hankering for more Advance-Wars-inspired turn-based strategy action to ring in the New Year are in luck. Developer Chucklefish has revealed that Wargroove's sizeable free Double Trouble DLC will arrive on 6th February.

For anyone in need of a refresher, Wargroove's Double Trouble DLC is, as its name suggests, themed around co-operative play. It introduces a new story campaign designed for two players - which follows the adventures of a band of rogues on a daring heist - and supports couch-based and online co-op, as well as solo play for those without immediate access to friends.

It also brings two new units - the stealthy Thieves and long-distance Riflemen - plus three new Outlaw Commanders, each with their own unique Grooves. There's Wulfar, Vesper, and "troublemaker twins" Errol and Orla, who count as a single Commander.

Read more

Developer Chucklefish has unveiled Double Trouble, a free new slab of DLC coming to its Advance-Wars-inspired turn-based strategy game Wargroove in the future.

Double Trouble, as its name suggests, has been designed with co-op play in mind, and, to that end, adds a new story campaign intended for two players. "After an unexpected kidnapping and some severe ransom demands," teases Chucklefish, "your group of rogues have no choice but to perform the biggest heist that Aurania has ever seen..." It'll support couch-based co-op, online co-op, and can even be played solo if there are no pals around.

Double Trouble will also introduce three new Outlaw Commanders - Wulfar, Vesper, and "troublemaker twins" Errol and Orla (who technically count as one Commander, in case you were wondering), as well as two new units in the form of Thieves and Riflemen.

Read more

The 'Red Hot Sale' continues to burn at Fanatical and this week has introduced a few new titles to spice up the mix of digital gaming deals.

Right away, you can get an absolute scorcher of a deal with Wargroove for just 9.59/$11.99 for the next 48 hours.

Seen as a spiritual successor to the likes of Advance Wars, the strategy RPG from Chucklefish was generously and carefully created according to Donlan, but he's still saving his love for the real thing. Even if Wargroove allows you to play as a canine commander called Caesar!

Read more

Halfway through playing WarGroove, which is secretly a pretty odd game, a thought occurred to me which turned out, the more I considered it, to be a pretty odd thought. What if this game isn't made by Chucklefish as the title screen suggests, the thought began. What if it isn't a forensic attempt at reconstructing an Intelligent Systems turn-based tactics game? What if it actually is an Intelligent Systems game, a new one, and this whole Chucklefish smokescreen is some grand social experiment, like that psych study that pretended to be measuring the efficacy of electric shocks on memory or ESP ability or whatever, but was really exploring people's willingness to administer electric shocks to strangers in the first place?

This thought bedded in and refused to go away. What I think I was really pondering, I guess, is the fact that I had approached WarGroove knowing it was a copy of something beloved, and that sense of it being a copy may have been dulling my enjoyment somewhat. Or was it?

WarGroove is a careful reworking of games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem. It takes the medieval fantasy of Fire Emblem, for example, but then its campaign flows more like Advance Wars, with little of Fire Emblem's cross-mission complexity. It's a very close study: the cheery tiled maps look almost identical to those of Intelligent Systems' games, while unit selection, movement, attack animations and all that jazz are very similar too. It's tempting while playing to work out which of WarGroove's units match up with which of Advance Wars' or Fire Emblems, but more importantly the action feels the same because the underlying principles are the same: capture towns to earn cash that allows you to mint new units from special buildings on the map, work out which units are strong against which other units and try to avoid overextending yourself. CO powers from Advance Wars become the titular WarGrooves here - each commander has a special ability that is charged up through play and will allow you to do something cool like heal everyone within a certain radius or pull friendly skeleton troops out of the earth to fight alongside you - and the battles unfold in a lovely corrugated manner as you press forward and then pause and then press forward again, getting the most out of different terrains like forests and mountains, pushing back fog of war on the maps that have it and, if you are really on top of things, placing units in the precise configurations that allow them to score critical hits.

Read more…

Here's a pleasant surprise: Wargroove has crossplay.

It's got cross-play across PC, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One, Chucklefish said in a tweet regarding the game's 1st February launch. There's no word on cross-play with PlayStation 4, but that's not much of a surprise given Sony's only recently enabled it, and only for a few games so far - and the PS4 version of Wargroove launches after the other versions at some point, too.

The cross-play function for Wargroove should mean the medieval Advance Wars-style game has as large a pool of multiplayer players as possible for matchmaking, which is of course a good thing for the community and the game itself.

Read more…

Wargroove comes out 1st February.

The announcement was made as part of today's indie-focused Nintendo Direct. Wargroove launches on 1st February on Nintendo Switch, PC and Xbox One.

Wargroove is a turn-based strategy game that's like a medieval Advance Wars, and very promising it looks, too. It's made by Chucklefish, the developer of Starbound and the publisher of Stardew Valley.

Read more…

It's perhaps a little far into the new year already to be offering you a preview of what's to come - sorry about that - but piecing together a full picture of coming attractions in 2019 hasn't been easy. After a first quarter packed with big releases and dominated by EA's would-be juggernaut Anthem, the picture is quite hazy, with big names being scarce and release dates - even of the very loosest variety - even scarcer.

Nintendo has a very busy year ahead (Animal Crossing, Fire Emblem, Luigi's Mansion, another Pok mon, potentially Metroid Prime and Bayonetta) but Sony's plans for PS4 are vague at best, and we would be shocked to see the likes of Death Stranding this year. It will be a long while before Microsoft's studio acquisition spree pays off, too, leaving Gears 5 and not much else to wave the Xbox flag. On the third-party side, we can be sure of seeing EA's next Star Wars game, and Ubisoft will surely have something as yet unannounced up its sleeve, while Cyberpunk 2077 seems more like a 2020 game - at the earliest.

Dig around a little, however, and you uncover a wealth of fascinating software from indie teams (headlined Spelunky 2), from what may be the last of the major crowdfunding projects (Shenmue 3 and Psychonauts 2) and from an emerging category of larger-scale, semi-indie productions with publisher backing, of which Obsidian's The Outer Worlds is the most exciting prospect. At first, we thought we'd struggle to find 50 games for the list, but by the end we had far more than we could feature.

Read more…