- Written by Sean Phillips
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 99
Well, it’s that time of year again! The time when all the big names and small names in the gaming industry gather in one place and get us gamers excited for what’s to come in our favorite pastime! Yep, it’s SUMMER GAME FEST 2025 and I have to say? Compared to last years which, in my opinion, was a really dull and disappointing show, this one was way better by a mile. Sure, there were some games that didn’t interest me, personally, but, overall, this was a really good show and I want to highlight some of the bigger announcements and ones that may be of interest to you!
Read more: Summer Game Fest 2025 - A Step Up From Last Year!
- Written by Joshua Wyld
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 187
The city builder genre is a bit…dry, don’t you think? Developer Megapop is here to change that with their upcoming game, Life Below, published by Kasedo Games. In a refreshing twist, the game takes place below the waves, as you play as an ocean guardian named Thalassa, who is tasked by Gaia to resurrect struggling underwater ecosystems using coral, seashells, lures, and much more to attract and satisfy local wildlife and flora. Through the use of quite a few resource management systems, you’ll slowly start to bring life to the sparsely populated ocean floor.
- Written by Zamir Twiggs
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 425
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.
- Written by Joshua Wyld
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 918
When you’re looking for games to play with a buddy, sometimes you just want to work together in a comfy setting, sitting back on your couch or over Discord and enjoying a story together. Hidalgo looks to provide that in a lovely way, based on our playthrough of the demo. After a successful Kickstarter campaign that you can still make late pledges to, Hidalgo is expected to come out May 2026. This should give the team at Infinite Thread Games plenty of time to craft and perfect an already pleasant experience. Here are our thoughts on the demo of Hidalgo, which I played on Steam for this preview.
- Written by Zamir Twiggs
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 963
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.
- Written by Brandon Billingsley
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 835
The Ace Attorney franchise doesn’t feature any anthropomorphic characters. Sure, it can get zany and feature strange stuff at times but for the most part it opts to be somewhat realistic with its cases. There aren’t any werewolves walking around or talking animals taking the spotlight. But there are characters who are animal tamers or otherwise work with animals that play pivotal roles in the cases they’re in. There are characters with names and attributes that clearly take inspiration from the animal kingdom. Animals themselves even show up as crucial evidence or get put on the witness stand. I intend to highlight those cases and characters here. Minor spoilers ahead for several games in the franchise, though I won’t delve too deeply into the cases themselves or discuss major plot points.
- Written by Brandon Billingsley
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 929
Developed by ascendant indie studio Vea Games and published by Knight’s Peak, Nikoderiko: The Magical World was released on October 15, 2024 across multiple platforms, including Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Playstation 4, Playstation 5 and Nintendo Switch, later followed by a Steam release on December 5. A loving homage to platformer classics like Crash Bandicoot and Donkey Kong Country Returns, Nikoderiko has been a hit with critics and gamers alike. Gaming Furever’s own reviewer played it for xbox and overall had a good time with it. Now Gaming Furever is here to bring you an interview with its Game Director, Dmitry Smirnov.
Read more: Interview with Nikoderiko Game Director Dmitry...
- Written by Leafblade
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 863
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.
- Written by Joshua Wyld
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 845
The staff here at Gaming Furever work all year long playing tons of games, and unsurprisingly, not all of them are filled with fluffy creatures and upright-walking animal people! Who'd have thought! We asked each of our staff members for their personal choices, without genre restriction, as it relates to the same categories as The Furry Game Awards 2024 we gave out this month, with an additional category for their "Extra" pick, without regards to what year the game was released, but they really found themselves playing a lot more of this year. We hope you enjoy taking a look through each of our own favorites for the year. We've got a wonderful group of writers here at GF, and can't wait to see what next year holds in the world of gaming and here at Gaming Furever! If you're interested in joining us on staff, we're still looking for more awesome people to join us in this journey.
Here are our Gaming Furever Staff Choice Award 2024 Winners:
- Written by Brandon Billingsley
- Category: Editorials
- Hits: 866
Pokémon, easily one of the most popular franchises in all of gaming. Even the most casual gamers who have never touched Pokémon, know what Pikachu looks like. And with that popularity, comes a significant number of spin-offs and attempts to branch the franchise out. One of which is of course the Pokémon TCG.
Released in 1996 not long after the games which it was based on, and just like those games, the Pokémon TCG quickly took off in popularity. So much so that they even made a Pokémon TCG game for the Game Boy. It was a golden era for GameFreak and their franchise. Even after Pokémon's popularity declined for a bit, the TCG scene remained active and to this day, it's considered one of the “Big 3” of TCGs alongside Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic: The Gathering. It’s received dedicated apps, at least two different digital versions and constantly updates alongside the video games. Then on October 30th, 2024 The Pokémon Company released Pokémon TCG Pocket, the newest app developed by DeNA(Who also worked on Pokémon Masters) and Creatures Inc which seeks to recapture that feeling of opening card packs and hoping for the rarest cards. So what is Pokémon TCG Pocket?