You know how sometimes you just stare at an email and the individual words make sense but it won’t quite come together as a whole? So, one of my preferred mobile deck-building games is getting a virtual reality adaptation: Ascension VR [official site].

I feel like that should somehow make sense to me, yet here I am, standing firm in the path of progress and saying “but… it’s a 2D game and I play it in not VR?”

Let’s take a closer look:

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Reigns [official site] – described by Adam as Crusader Kings meets Tinder – will be swiping its way onto PC from 11 August.

I remember it being one of his favourite games at Rezzed when we went earlier in the year so let’s have a look at what he said at the time and why he liked it so much. But first, some gameplay footage:

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Earlier this year, Trion Worlds invented a revolutionary new business model for their turn-based tactical combat game Atlas Reactor [official site]. They called it “buy-to-play“, meaning that players would buy the game then get to play it. What a wild bunch! Where do they get these ideas from? A few months later, it seems they’re maybe concerned they were a bit too ‘out there’. The Trove and Rift devs have announced that Atlas Reactor will also have a ‘Free Mode’ letting everyone play with a rotating limited selection of characters for free. But what should we call this model?

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Every Monday, Brendan scurries through the undergrowth of the great early access fields. This week, he gets paws-on with rodent adventure Ghost of a Tale [official site].>

Let’s just pick up all our jaws from the floor first. I mean, look at this game. Look at it. From the Gormenghast-style dungeons to the cute, gormless expression on protagonist Tilo’s mousey face, there is a beauty to this five-person project that many bigger studios could not hope to replicate. What do you expect when the head of the studio is a former Dreamworks animator? Yes, this world of mice and rats and spiders looks spectacular. I want us all to agree on that. Sadly, as a game, it is also perilously old-fashioned.

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Ah, the early tensies! Cast your mind back to an era when a Slender Man lurked in every corner, crazed diary entries littered the streets, and Nicola Roberts was making a real go of a solo career. Of all the first-person stealth-o-spookers that followed Amnesia and old balloonhead, Outlast was one of the better ones. Following a touch of DLC, developers Red Barrels announced a sequel would follow in 2016 but… now that’s delayed. You’ll need to wait until 2017 to flee from a murderous religious cult.

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Slain [official site] was full of retro \m/etal style, with pixel art skulls bathed in lurid lighting, skellingtons to bash, blood and slime all over the place, and music by a former member of Celtic Frost. It’s a shame that the hack ‘n’ slash platforming all that is built upon was kinda blah. The developers had rushed it out, see, planning to patch later. Unsurprisingly, its launch was not graceful. But! They have followed through with the patching, and after several months it’s now reborn as Slain: Back From Hell with a whole load of fixes and new features.

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If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, the team behind The Elder Scrolls: Legends [official site] must be great fans of Hearthstone. Much of this new collectible card game will be instantly familiar to those who’ve played Blizzard’s Warcraft-based equivalent. There’s a gradually increasing pool of magic points with which to play cards. The same attack value and health stats, with most creatures being unable to strike on the turn they’re summoned. A slew of common special abilities that break the base rules, such as allowing for an attack immediately after being played, or having a one-hit shield to protect them from damage. Sure, everything has a different name, like “Guard” instead of “Taunt”, but the initial sense of deja vu is overwhelming. Thankfully, that fades.

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: several spaceships and their crews have gone missing around a remote alien planet and you’re sent in to find them. Must an FPS, yeah? An action-RPG, maybe? Nah mate, Inside the Void [official site] is a first-person walk-o-explorer. It’s a flipping gorgeous one too, and spookier than I’d expected. It’s free t’boot so do have a look if you like a good wander.

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Titan Quest is my favourite clickety-clicky hack and slash game. It doesn’t have the intelligent dynamic design of Soldak’s games, the meaty character building of Path of Exile or the polish of Diablo III, but it’s mythological worlds and monsters are beautiful. It’s bright where so many are dark (including the creators’ own follow-up Grim Dawn) and now that I’ve mentioned it I want to play through the whole thing again.

At its best, Vikings: Wolves of Midgard [official site] is like Titan Quest transported from Hellenic lands to the frozen axe-grinding of Norse mythology, but the early build I played fumbles some of the ARPG fundamentals.>

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Real-time strategy games seem to be a dying artform, which is a shame given that Eugen System’s RUSE provided a perfect roadmap for where they might want to go.

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