You have to give Valve credit for one thing: They know how to run a good online store. Because even if the Steam Store is far from perfect, at the Steam Next Fest here I once again enjoyed the ease with which you can not only sort games in any variation by genre, perspective, topic and other criteria, but also install them, on the wish list sets and much more.
This made it easy for me to download a few candidates that seemed interesting—or just quirky enough to just give them a quick try. As a result, I now know at least that I will certainly not deepen my relationship with the Snow Plowing Simulator, i.e. the snow shoveling simulator, in the future. GeneRally 2, on the other hand, didn’t seem like a good candidate to pick up on old Super Sprint times. It’s also a pity that The Hungry Fly won’t be a new Bad Mojo.
However, there were a couple of demos that I found really strong and two of them have even now held my interest for a surprisingly long time. In other words, if you want to know which of the many Steam Next Fest demos could be worthwhile quickies for the weekend, here are a few tips for you.
And not just me! Alex also rummaged around and discovered a game in Xenonauts 2 that once again sparked his love for UFO: Enemy Unknown, part one of today’s XCOM series. You can read what he has to say about it in his in-depth article, while Ana tells you what she thinks of Howl in the following video. This is also a round tactic – albeit drawn in the Middle Ages and with “living ink”.
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system shock
But let me start with real time and a very obvious candidate. Because mainly this is more of an indication that the current demo of the System Shock remake is a lot more extensive than the previous ones and also closer to the finished game in terms of user guidance. In fact, this time you can explore the entire first floor of the Citadel space station and above all play the interactive intro in the hacker’s apartment. Take a close look at the shelves there. As a connoisseur of the original, he also uses his instrument several times.
And don’t miss cyberspace once you’ve landed on the space station! You won’t be playing a fancier Descent imitator any time soon. Anyway, the colorful neon lights and the cool electronic soundtrack really appeal to me. I had already written a little more about all of this at gamescom, when the same demo was already playable in the business area.
The degree of difficulty can be set in several stages on the four familiar levels of combat, puzzles, cyberspace and the complexity of the missions. Healing stations no longer repair body cells with magic clicks, but by lying inside them for a few seconds… Even more so than Xenonauts 2, I can’t wait for the Kickstarter versions to finally go “ready to play”. Especially since I even invested in the real cardboard box here.
Bleak Sword DX
We stick to real time, but change the perspective. Bleak Sword DX is a roguelike in which you fight against dangerous creatures with a pixel warrior in very stylish dioramas (they always work these days). Apple Arcade has been around for a long time, but has been greatly expanded for PC and Switch. It also looks really good in motion and, above all, plays very quickly and directly.
In any case, I had a lot of fun with the first levels, because the fights require good timing, since you not only have to keep an eye on the very limited stamina, but also counter incoming attacks at the right moment in order to fight back particularly well. This, in turn, is important because otherwise you will not eliminate later enemy groups quickly enough. If different creatures attack with their very different movements and timings, you have to have a good eye for the different actions and is well advised to reduce the number of enemies as quickly as possible.
Different levels of difficulty and game modes make it easy or difficult, of course, although I liked the new DX mode best: The enemy compositions are more interesting there and the dioramas are more varied and numerous. But I’m particularly excited about the random mode that the finished game will contain.
Darkest dungeon 2
Of course, that’s not exactly an insider tip either, but of course I didn’t want to miss Darkest Dungeon 2. And the first thing you notice is that this time you drive the carriage through the area in real time and thus meet opponents or other events. A distinctive narrator accompanies this procedural journey as you not only buy and sell gear at shelters, but also choose which of the routes branching off from there you take the following day.
Apart from that, not too much has changed at first glance. The art design is a bit more distinctive and especially the different attacks of all characters are captured in strong images. The actual round tactics are still pleasantly complex and the adventure is merciless as usual. Anyway, when I threw my arms in the air to celebrate victory against a strong enemy, the next group was already in front of me and finished my run. Question to all psychologists and hobby experts: Why do you actually do this? Ah, forget it. On to the next run!
The Last Starship
Also included is the new game from legendary indie studio Introversion Software and creators of Prison Architect: The Last Starship. After all, here you screw a spaceship together like a prison boss, so you have to ensure propulsion, fuel supply and oxygen production in order to then complete various missions. This ranges from simply scanning an anomaly, fulfilling transport requests, to combat.
How you expand your own vehicle is up to you. You can even change the layout if you have enough resources. The space boat should only meet the requirements, i.e. have all the necessary equipment or weapons on board. Incidentally, I found it very successful how the base delivered two new sensors by shuttle, because they didn’t just suddenly appear.
The Last Starship will be released on February 15th, which is why I haven’t invested too much time at this point. But the potentially promising game is definitely worth a look.
gripper
Before I get straight to my personal surprises, let me briefly mention Gripper, in which you either zoom through tubes on a futuristic motorcycle with a shoulder view or fight big bosses in an arena from a bird’s eye view. Now, to be honest, I didn’t like the obstacle avoidance in Tube Turf, but I did find the top-down action entertaining.
There you don’t shoot like so often, but grab rocks, explosive barrels or even small opponents with grappling hooks and then throw them in the direction of the boss or other dangers. You can also briefly hook onto large rocks or even the bosses themselves to pull yourself up to them and gain a lot of momentum. That was damn short, but also quite entertaining.
Oblivion Override
But it was only Oblivion Override that really grabbed me – completely surprisingly, after I had rolled my eyes at first. The fact that this is a rather brazen imitator of Dead Cells is something you have to put down before you snip your way through the corridors of a robot-occupied world again and again. It’s all a bit less chic than in the big model and also feels a little slower. But once I got in, I very quickly had a similar amount of fun with it.
This is partly due to the very different weapons, including knives for fast melee combat, a spear for rapid advance and stabbing, and an axe, with which you should always wait a few seconds to then cause particularly large damage. The weapons have individual special attacks, you will find stronger versions of them later and of course you also get both passive and active abilities via perks, which make your own robot life easier.
Unlike in Dead Cells, you can buy one of three randomly offered skills at any time as soon as you have collected enough resources for it. In addition, there are also traders and a fairly large base where you unlock global progress and also get to know the other residents in short dialogues.
I really enjoyed it. The flow is great, optional and required boss fights are wonderfully crisp, you can throw enemies back into dangers such as energy barriers and the art design and music are also convincing, while the stabbing and hitting has the right punch. As little as I knew Oblivion Override before: Now the blatant imitator is on my list!
DROP
And then I finally got to DROP, which I was really excited about because I like programming and hacking simulations. Don’t worry: not a single line of code is written here. And of course you don’t have to have any knowledge of hacking. It is sufficient to be able to move a cursor over connected fields and click on the options available there. These boxes are nodes of a network that either personal information, data folders or security programs dock to, and to download or disable them, you just click on them.
The whole thing is tricky because each process triggered in this way takes a certain amount of time and you can only run a limited number of such processes at the same time – while security programs attack the firewall and you should also regularly delete your traces. It’s not like you’re constantly pressed for time or have to click fast in continuous fire mode. But because time does play a role, this tension subtly increases the stress level.
It is important to keep an eye on the network at all times. Is the firewall still stable or does it need to be repaired? Where are which processes taking place and which step should be taken next? This constant process management is what real hacking mimics – and what feels cool at the latest when you dock autonomous programs that automatically read data or take over other tasks, so to a large extent you manage more than switch.
Of course, completing optional tasks gives you extra money, which you can then invest in better hardware or some of those standalone programs. More powerful hardware speeds up many processes and allows more processes to be run at the same time than at the beginning. In other words: The new old MicroProse already has some very interesting games in its portfolio and DROP seems to fit in well with this group!
