Smallands: Survive the Wilds is an open world survival that puts us in the shoes of an insect-sized creature struggling with a wild world teeming with dangers, managing to instill a certain sense of unease when battling ants, cockroaches and various beetles. Basic resources are fairly common, but to get the more valuable ones you have to grind a little bit and fight, with an overall above-average difficulty. The tiny character is charismatic, and the same can be said for the NPCs, and the story reserves some surprises, to be discovered little by little as you progress through the game, alone or in company.

After nine years, Secrets of Grindea finally leaves Early Access. The finished product is undoubtedly a fun, charming action RPG à la Zelda with a great build variety and an emphasis on loot and farming. However, it does suffer a little when compared with other, similar games that released during its long development cycle.

Robin Hood – Sherwood Builders uses videogame language to be discovered and to surprise. It is an enveloping and engaging video game, which offers a pleasant and exciting play structure, with a generous number of activities. There are some inaccuracies, but it is an RPG with survival dynamics with excellent characteristics. Absolutely must have.

Empty Shell is a twin stick shooter with a horror-themed top down view, similar in gameplay to Hotline Miami but with a less frantic pace and a completely different look, here entirely in grayscale with various filters to simulate the nowadays ancient CRT monitors. The variety of weapons and enemies is quite good, and when life points begin to run low there is a definite anxiety in opening the next door without knowing what we will be fighting. The gameplay is simple and the story takes up the classic experiment where everything went wrong, yet the dark, claustrophobic atmosphere will manage to catch even the most demanding players.

One Last Breath is a puzzle platformer with a very good narrative idea and a satisfying realization. Unfortunately the puzzles are very banal and some maps are made with very little care.

Terra Memoria confirms itself to be neither more nor less than what the trailers and images suggest: a truly cozy Western JRPG. It's an RPG with a modern feel that is an ode to the great classics of the past and, at the same time, to the importance of the journey even before the destination, a cute and cuddly indie work just like its furry protagonists.

What if during the jump from mobile to PC you lose some attractiveness and do not try to remedy it in any way? Slice & Dice's formula, perfect on smartphones, is a bit poor on the desktop, and there is nothing to do but decide which dice to roll and which enemy to attack, hoping for an interesting drop or the arrival of a stronger character. The strategic component would be interesting, thanks to gameplay that allows us to know the moves of monsters in advance, but it is all too simple and too tied to luck. The multiple options and situations make it a good game, but not the expected masterpiece.

One could easily define Lotus Lantern: Rescue Mother as a reskin of Hades set in Chinese mythology, and trash it upon seeing that it does not touch the qualitative heights reached by Supergiant Games' work. The gameplay, however, is captivating, and the roguelite structure coupled with a good handling of the difficulty curve entices you to jump into another run to field test the newly achieved perks and the new character build. Each enemy has its own movement and attack pattern to learn, and the bosses are challenging enough. It doesn't innovate the genre, but it gets the job done.

At face value, Nordic Ashes offers a lot of content, which makes it feel even more weird when you realize that build variety is one of its issues, due to how character progression works during a run. Overall, it’s not a bad enemy hell kind of game, but it doesn’t make top of the class.

The Forgotten Kingdom is the classic excellent DLC for Remnant II: a budget price for an important amount of content. in the future, however, something more will be needed to keep the game alive for a long time.

It's really not easy to recommend a roguelite with classic gameplay at this precise moment in history, yet Shadow of the Depth manages to entertain and offer a good level of challenge, so why shouldn't we consider it? The various classes offer distinct gameplay, and the ability to equip a warrior with a mage's items and successfully field test them opens the door to different builds to explore. Skill trees are lacking, and perks are not as crucial, but the growth of heroes run after run is evident and invites one to throw in the classic "last try." Nothing new, but all well implemented.

A highly atmospheric text adventure, with well-characterized characters despite some clichés and a plot that we can shape, one choice at a time. Cooper's development doesn't involve much furthermore, between rhythm and gameplay, there are several ups and downs which, together with the bugs, don't allow the game to shine like the neon lights of Terrahive.

This new revival, in addition to engaging and exciting, details the talent of Tekla and Jonathan Blow. It is a new look that, in addition to involving and impressing, embellishes the journey, making it pleasant and much higher than it appears. The work is absolutely valuable, so much so that the vote below, exactly in line with the value of the work and the past, remains unchanged or almost unchanged.

You will never look at ants the same way! The small team at Slug Disco has not revolutionised the RTS genre, but they offer us a unique perspective on it, where the quality of world-building plays a huge role in how fascinating this game is. It almost make me forget there is no multiplayer.

Fields of Glory: Kingdoms is the Sword in the Rock of strategists, the Hammer of Thor of 4X games. To use it properly you have to be worthy, you have to be the Chosen Ones. How much time are you willing to invest in learning the gameplay mechanics? If the answer is “as much as it takes,” you have on your hands the most complex and comprehensive grand strategy game around, capable of engaging you for months, if not years, thanks to a painstaking simulation of all aspects of running a kingdom, from politics to religion, from lineage to warfare. If you do not feel like devoting your full attention to the game, it’s not your cup of tea.

Nuke Them All is a variation on the usual RTSs that focuses all on action and confrontations with opposing troops, sometimes interrupted by zombie apocalypses or alien invasions. Base building and resource management are barely sketched out, and complicated scientific research trees are not even present. All we have to do is capture the flags on the battlefield as quickly as possible and then launch the final attack on the enemy. The maps are large with multiple biomes, although elevations and depressions in the terrain do not seem to offer any particular advantages or disadvantages. If you are looking for a casual approach RTS with furious shootouts, this is your game.

Shift 87 is a walking simulator that hybridizes within it an unsuccessful loop mechanic regarding the reporting of any anomalies. The basic idea is interesting, but it's a shame that continuing through the maps is extremely difficult, also due to the various bugs.

While the effort that went into creating Mars 2120 can certainly be praised, this is not the kind of game that you would easily recommend to friends. It’s never bad or outright awful, mind you, and playing it is a fairly easy-going experience. But at the same time, low enemy variety, poor bosses, generic story and uneven optimization means that this game will stay very far from the top of the charts.

It's easy to say "boomer shooter," but how many exponents of the genre, with bare-bones gameplay and linear levels, would be able to entertain like King DOOM? Very few, and from time to time id Software likes to remind us. DOOM + DOOM II is the front row seat to watch this show, as well as a game that should be in every respectable collection. Online multiplayer will not rewrite the rules of competitive gaming, but Legacy of Rust could open the doors to new mods bringing new episodes into a great virtuous loop. And just to clarify, the vote is not at all political. It remains to date an awesome game.

Terminus: Zombie Survivors is an excellent turn-based strategy with a character creation and growth system worthy of the best role-playing games, where before facing zombies you have to think about your vital parameters, just like in survival games. Fifteen classes, multiple endings, procedural map generation and tons of items to find, craft and use guarantee hours of playing time. Combat is simpler than what we've seen in the XCOM series, with gameplay more similar to board games than video games, but anyone who loves zombie culture will want to get to Terminus at least a few times.

Knock on the Coffin Lid aims to expand on the gameplay of the Slay the Spire-inspired games by adding an interesting story to follow thanks to charismatic characters, excellent speech, and a highly polished graphical style. Forget the forked progression until you get to the boss, here there is great freedom allowed for exploration thanks to very large maps full of interconnected points of interest. Fighting takes place in the typical style of this genre of video games, and although the many cards available do not introduce great innovation, we are in front of one of the best card battlers around.

Kring is a project that the author himself defines as intimately personal and, therefore, carried out out of pure hedonism. You buy it at your own risk with the knowledge that the game is the way it likes it, not the way it likes it, or you, or an audience framed by some market survey. So you may find it funny or maybe not, brilliant or terribly stupid, unmissable or forgettable and you can't get out of it: it goes just to taste. I found it pleasant but not irresistible, engaging but a little too borderline to last long. In short, one of those novelties that drive you crazy at first, but for which you soon lose interest. For five euros, however, it is free, and it is definitely worth doing this psychedelic gaming experience, if only to encourage Ivan to do other similar things.

Zero Hour isn't groundbreaking or technically perfect, it has some obvious limitations, and the AI ​​leaves much to be desired. That said, it's a good entry point for tactical FPS newbies thanks to its immediate and engaging mix of slow-paced gameplay and wild PVP.

Shift Legacy Collection perfectly embraces the definition “a blast from the past,” bringing back to the present day a game that marked a happy era of gaming. Sixteen years have passed, but the gameplay is still as captivating and engaging as on day one. It is a pity, however, that no new material has been added to the collection of the four Shift chapters; to be nitpicky, one could say that we are paying for a series of games that were once free and can still be launched on browsers, however, the required amount is small and allows us to have everything beautifully ready in our library.

Mechabellum might look like a simple game at first glance, and it’s very easy to get into – you drop some robots, watch them fight other robots and blow each other up. But it doesn’t take long before you realize that there’s a very deep strategic layer behind every decision, even something apparently as simple as “where do I place a unit”. Recommended for people who love the decision making in RTS games but have very poor APM (like me).

A remastered work as simple as it is effective, and I will certainly be repetitive. Lollipop Chainsaw RePop arrives at the goal and with an interesting purpose: to be able to entertain old players and beyond. It could be fitting in after finishing other more challenging, such as a Frostpunk 2, or an alternative Black Myth: Wukong, in which knowing how to beat is an obligation.

Excellent and always on point, Kan Gao succeeds in the complex attempt to propose an adventure as usual special and touching, touching the right chords through a simple but effective plot. The goal of the production is to revive part of the experience of To the Moon, a goal that is achieved in an absolutely noble way. The gameplay, not particularly changed compared to the past, focuses on classic and already known dictates. Also on this front, but because the operations of the Canadian developer do not change, not much could be expected. He prefers to focus on emotions, showing them off. An excellent act of beauty.

Vampire - The Masquerade: Reckoning of New York is the worst chapter of the visual novel version of the franchise. Listless, without bite and with an uninteresting protagonist. The trilogy ends with a chapter below expectations.