Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring’s hangover. It’s the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not “mojito time”, Geoff, put those away. It’s time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many videogames have escaped from their developers in the past six months and are now running amok through the blistering streets, getting stuck in the melting tarmac, like ants in jam. It’s unsanitary. So allow us to round up these unruly games and trap them in a handy list. Here are our favourite sword swingers and space ‘splorers so far this year (and a couple of DLCs for good measure).

Okay, Geoff, now> bring the mojitos.

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Occasionally, when I pause They Are Billions and zoom out on my tightly packed, grid-based steampunk settlement, I think about how the tiny families in the centre could have just as easily lived their entire lives without ever seeing a single zombie. There s little in the way of a fixed story or characters in this survival strategy, either in its separate challenge maps or ambitious, flawed campaign. But there is a constant mood of melancholy, darkening the air like industrial smog; the uneasy feeling humanity died out a long time ago. As the saying goeth, you either watch your settlement get munched to bits by zombies, or you live long enough to continue colonising hell to extend the borders of a grim dystopia. Jolly good, then.

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Numerically hyperbolic survival-strategy They Are Billions has added a campaign mode, so we can finally find out why all these nice pale shambly folk are so hungry all the time. The New Empire, as the singleplayer story is called, looks to double down on the latent colonialist fantasies already inherent in steampunk, allowing you to ride your big imperial choo choo across the map and settle you some locations. The update also marks the end of eighteen months in early access, bringing the game to version 1.0. Look upon this trailer, ye mighty, and go “oh, cool, zombies ‘n’ stuff.”

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Zombie RTS They Are Billions made a big impact when it launched into early access. Despite lacking a traditional campaign mode, it even inspired Conan Unconquered. Rather than bank it all on the strength of their horde survival, Numantian games are launching it out of early access in just twelve days, bulking it up with a story-driven campaign called The New Empire on June 18th. In it, players lead the last human city to reconquer their (un)dead world. They’ve gone all-in, and estimate that the campaign clocks in at a huge sixty to eighty hours long. See the release date trailer below.

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Zombopocalyptic steampunk RTS They Are Billions is in the final stretch of production, and developers Numantian Games reckon that it’ll be done by July. Unlike many games leaving early access, they’re not just tying a bow on it and pushing it out the door. Instead, they’re bolting on a seemingly massive, branching story-driven campaign on to what is currently just a zombie horde survival game. In a big developer blog update today, they shared a shambling horde of details on the campaign’s story, structure, how it differs from Starcraft or Age Of Empires and some Spanish screenshots.

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Zombopocalyptic steampunk RTS They Are Billions is in the final stretch of production, and developers Numantian Games reckon that it’ll be done by June. Unlike many games leaving early access, they’re not just tying a bow on it and pushing it out the door. Instead, they’re bolting on a seemingly massive, branching story-driven campaign on to what is currently just a zombie horde survival game. In a big developer blog update today, they shared a shambling horde of details on the campaign’s story, structure, how it differs from Starcraft or Age Of Empires and some Spanish screenshots.

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It’s rare for strategy games to go all-in on their story mode, but the initial early access success of steampunk zombie RTS They Are Billions has opened up the chance for developers Numantian Games. In a big development blog post on Steam, they declare their plans to extend the game’s stay in early access, with the scripted campaign mode debuting in its entirety on launch day. It’s understandable why they’d need a bit longer, as they’re now claiming the campaign will weigh in at an evening-devouring “40-50 hours of content”, though they’re not skimping on the other facets of the game.

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They Are Billions is the video game equivalent of spending time assembling some sort of mechanical thing – a rocking chair, let’s say, with various interlocking parts. And then, as you step back to view your good work, the cat springs up onto it and, eyes locked with yours, lets loose a magnificent, four-tiered modernist turd right into the middle of the seat.

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Steampunk zombiefest RTS They Are Billions may not have a campaign yet (it’s coming), but I reckon this latest early access update might be more important in the long run. Released yesterday, developers Numantian Games rolled out their Steam Workshop-integrated editor after a couple weeks of testing. Players can build scenarios both hand-crafted or procedural, with custom rules, complex scripting and new victory conditions. They also released a new official challenge scenario – even with reinforcements, can you finish your defences when the horde is only 50 days away?

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We’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there.

2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…)