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Relic developed one of my favorite strategy games, the Dawn of War series. So when they announced Earth vs. Mars, I was taken aback that they were making a turn-based game instead of an RTS. Announced earlier this year, it was a departure from their usual style of gritty real-time violence. Earth vs. Mars is a turn-based strategy that feels intimately familiar to those who played games like Advanced Wars, Wargroove, or Tiny Metal. Units consist of infantry, tanks, artillery, and helicopters, led by commanders with special abilities you charge up by winning fights and capturing points. There are two things I noticed that expand the formula.

Kiseff has made an amazing adventure with fast action, impactful class fantasy, relentless enemies, a strong emphasis on defense and positioning, a healthy amount of customization options, and the ability to host a small server of friends! Atlyss races come in 5 forms, mischievous imps, rabbit/fox like poons, the cheng rodents, corvid like byrdles, the scaley goobers the kobolds. You can play with face characteristics, tails, species-defining characteristics like ears or beaks, body size (we all know about this), color, and body patterns. It’s satisfying playing with these tools, making your character. You’re a reincarnated creature, summoned by the Guardian, Angela, to prevent the world from succumbing to corrupt energies. You get acquainted with the hub, accept your starting quest, and begin a deceptively simple task of killing slimes. 

Wild Assault didn’t just provide well-designed anthro characters, it committed time to developing animations that added to the uniqueness of each species. A third-person shooter, Wild Assault has you engaged in battle as one of 10 valiants, using their unique powers to capture territory or objective markers and deplete your opponent’s points. Early access starts with 2 game modes, Conquest and Raid, and two maps, the Mojave Desert and the Rocky Mountains. Mojave’s only playable in Conquest, while the Ricky Mountains are in both Conquest and Raid. Raid matches use one of two halves of the mountain map, with one side attacking, the other defending. Defenders win once the attackers lose all their points or time’s up. Attackers win when they capture all points. Both maps are littered with lots of cover. Ironically, this makes it easier for people to sneak around and kill you without noticing. I favored Raid more, for faster matches and a clearer idea of the battle lines, though the half-sized maps feel small with 40 players fighting for objectives. They recently added a Deathmatch for a limited time, with two teams of 8 participating in a classical battle to wear out their opponent’s points.

Quick and Flashy

A graveyard of rusted automatons, decorated in bright red grass. Hanging from the floating islands were gears, indistinguishable from stone. The area was called the Golem Gardens, a verdant ruin reclaimed by nature. Bushes and saplings grew from sentinels actively guarding the rubble. These machines, covered in detritus with the emblem of a vortex molded on their chassis, could easily kill careless Leapers. My best chance of surviving is to move, swiftly, find the openings to strike, and get away. Something I learned immediately after a sphere-shaped sentinel tried to hinder my paws with goo, was to never stop moving!

 Motion Twin’s next game is beautiful, bright, and fast! The world’s sundered and the floating islands orbit a raging vortex. Our role as Leapers, is to brave the hazardous vortex pulling all sky islands to it. Currently, these expeditions take us through 4 biomes, where we can unlock 17 different weapons, 14 unique trinkets, and recover 100 memories to augment all our abilities. The only way to traverse the broken landscape is to dash. In most games dashing carelessly makes you fall to your death, but not here. Every dash turns me into a beam of light that blinks from place to place. It’s responsive, and there’s nuance to be efficient. I could dash to avoid an enemy on your island, but there’s a short cooldown, if I blink to another elevation or small island neighboring mine, I can instantly dash again. I flash between platforms, evading attacks from aggressive enemies, and exploring secrets of a crumbling world.

 The weapons are immensely satisfying in my little Leaper’s arms! The Heavy Blade’s attacks are weighty and exceptional for smashing golems, Kunai are good opening weapons, applying a stacking curse condition that does tons of damage when detonated. My first weapon, a community favorite, the Fish Knife is a swift weapon with a simple three-hit combo that ends with a crit, making it the quickest weapon to trigger special attacks with my swapped weapon. Clearing islands and defeating enemies in every biome unlocks new weapons, like the Shrunken or Anchor Boom. As I progress the weapons I find become augmented with abilities, like burning enemies struck, covering them in goo, and doubling in size to outrageous proportions. To provide some auxiliary support, I’m given trinkets that could freeze enemies, blast enemies surrounding me, trap them in ooze, and more. The memories of past Leapers grant real power, I can cause shockwave blasts with every strike, absorb health for each enemy I kill, inflict extra damage to solo enemies, and gain bonus conditions that trigger my weapon’s ultimate Aether attack! Aether attacks are bombastic, signature strikes, that decimate foes and make me invulnerable during their animations.

Busting up machines and braving the vortex doesn’t have to be lonely. I’ve joined 2 other Leapers for expeditions, thinking fighting most Sentinels would be a breeze. You can trade aggro, share pools of potions, and trade items. However complacency invites mistakes, and eventually enemies get enhancements that could ruin us; elite mobs with shadow clones, made me withdraw and watch their moves. Some had orbiting lasers that burned my fur and punished me for mistakes, dashing. The loss of a Leaper used to put everyone in Sudden Death, where a single hit would’ve killed us; now it enrages the survivors, sending them into Revenge mode. We cause serious damage, but forgo self-defense, taking more damage and bloodlust makes us forget to use healing potions. Only when I’ve savaged enough enemies, covering my paws with blood and oil, do I leave Revenge mode. 

Though there’s a little story shared throughout the game, most of it’s passive, through enemy design, environments, and bosses. Early levels give the impression of an advanced civilization, fallen to ruin, with barely functional automation sentries. After the factory, my enemies aren’t hobbled machines, but healthy rat pirates, and later a map that reminded me there was a story this game wanted to tell, and it did so through enemy and map design. After you finish your first encounter with the final boss, and what it unlocks, it causes speculation, not about the vortex.

Windblown is still in early access, with new modes, maps, and more unlockables coming. They just finished a patch which added more story, and the Sanctuary biome, designed to make you question what you know about your home hub, the Ark. Twin Motion made a compelling world with map design, and character details, creating mysteries with barely a word, and the childishly innocent designs of this world are shattered as you mature in capability. Windblown is worth playing and following. Twin Motion is building something shocking at the eye of this storm, and I’m not changing course.

Fellow beast, raise your snouts and notice a change in the gaming landscape. Once dominated primarily by human characters, the gaming ecosystem is booming with projects where the protagonists are quadrupedal animals, anthropomorphic animals, or monsters. We’re surviving in a Rain World, preserving the young of the Endling: Extinction is Forever, in competitions where Friends vs Friends, leading cults like the Cult of the Lamb, leading nations in an Age of Wonders, and reclaiming a kingdom through Tails of Iron. These stories are depicted through simple hand-drawn art, abstract lighting, stop motion, and fully rendered 3D environments. Beast races are making a return, not simply as niche characters, but as epics, expanded upon and featured as the main characters of mythological stories, like in Black Myth: Wukong.

An unusual elk was spotted in the highlands, and I was part of the hunting party racing to its last location. From the back of our journeykin, we pounced the elk and it fought with leyline-infused techniques. We were making progress, when it started running, forcing us to remount our journeykin and pursue it! We readied harpoons with chains to slow it as it zigged and zagged, trying to throw us off. It took several attempts but we stopped it and continued the assault. As before, we waylaid the elk, exhausting its vitality before it began to run again. This time our pursuit led us to another situation, a wolf pup was sickened and the kodan needed help gathering herbs to fight the sickness. It was looking rough, there weren’t enough people to hold off the titans and gather herbs. Trusting the party that began the hunt to finish it, I broke off and went to the pup’s aid.

This series of events is exactly why I love playing Guild Wars 2. You begin one of the many tasks that unfold in the world and it intercepts another task. These events are built to engage you with the world and convey the themes of each map. The Lowlands map doesn’t have a meta event, relying on small local events to convey kodan culture, from hunting and gathering to agriculture and combat. You tend to basic chores around towns, and maybe get an unusual request from a cryptozoologist, however, a strange rot spreads, and you’ll investigate the underlying threat while fighting its effects on the ecosystem.

The forests of this realm were quiet, and an unsettling chill always lingered in the air. Though we channeled the Tome of Glades to camouflage our race with fur and our uncanny ability to traverse the woods gracefully, the land was hostile with an unrelenting sense of wrongness. Our magic changed barren spaces to something livable, but death wasn’t just an intangible thing here, it claimed this world and the beasts in them.