July 24 - 30 | Gamers With Jobs

Section:

IMAGE(https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/files/pictures/pictures/picture-13445.jpg) Felix “Catstronauts” Threepaper

Welcome folks, and happy “41st Anniversary of Eye of the Tiger hitting #1 on the Billboard charts” week!

In 1982, Survivor released Eye of the Tiger, the theme song for Rocky III, the day after the movie came out. Stallone had wanted to use Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust as the theme song, but Queen said no. It was Survivor’s only number one song. Throughout the 2010s a bunch of Republicans kept using it in their campaigns without permission and Survivor kept suing them, successfully. You may all celebrate by playing a game where the AI boneheadedly makes the same mistake and you punish it.

The door is closing squeakily on Quiet July, and behind it you can hear the ominous fantasy chanting of a much louder August.

There’s a bunch of quality indies rounding out the week, among the DLC and ports.

The Expanse: A Telltale Series - Episode 1 is the first fully-fledged game to emerge from the Telltale Games phoenix. LCG Entertainment bought the original Telltale after it went bankrupt and is now trading under the old shingle. This a story-based game with 5 episodes, with an episode dropping every two weeks. The gameplay will focus heavily on narrative and remembering your decisions—you don’t revive the brand name “Telltale” to make multiplayer shooters. The narrative gameplay chops are boosted by the involvement of Deck Nine, who worked with Dontnod on the Life is Strange series.

A new feature that makes the game more *ahem* Expansive than older Telltale games is the more open environments and traversal methods. It wouldn’t be The Expanse without mag boots and zero-g, and there are plenty of sections where these are in play, giving greater scope to free-roam and explore before following the main path.

The story is set before the events of the TV show and books, where you play as everyone’s favourite Belter, Carmina Drummer. She’s getting about with a scavenger crew, exploring spaceship wrecks for salvage and making difficult decisions, even before the main plot heats up. Along the way there will be cameos by characters from the TV show, voiced by their TV actors.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart is the first Ratchet game to come out on PC, so desk gamers can finally enjoy videogames’ funnest arsenal of weapons.

Remnant II is a Soulslike but also a third-person shooter, which makes it more of a Returnalike. The first Remnant game is always recommended to me by the “based on other games you like” algorithm, but the title and cover art look so 2004-era videogame, my eye always flicks past it.

Under the generic brown packaging, the gameplay was solid enough to become a cult hit, despite being punishingly hard in solo mode. Gearbox picked it up as publisher and threw in cash for a bigger sequel.

Remnant II has a graphical glow-up that only a AAA budget can give. The third-person shootering has also been smoothed and honed, including much improved melee. Plus, you can jump now. And where Remnant had procedurally-generated levels, the proc-gen has now been expanded to enemy types, bosses, quests, and even the storyline itself. Clearly they want you to play through this game multiple times. It also supports co-op for up to 3 players.

Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara is an all-ages 3D platformer set on a pirate-infested island with a 3D Mario vibe. Jump around, collect clams.

Space Cats Tactics combines turn-based spaceship battles and squad battles in a cool way. The hex-based spaceship battles are meatier than the lean gruel served up by Sid Meier’s Starships, with more variety of actions and outcomes. Maybe a hit on your ship started a fire in the engine room, or you sent boarders onto another ship to take its bridge. Then you zoom the camera in, and the ship becomes a square grid map. This squad mode is FTL-meets-XCOM style encounters, where you use your differently-skilled crew members to solve problems and deal with enemies. All this for only 3 Gig of memory! Switching between pew-pew ship battles and squad-based action is a tantalising proposition and I hope it delivers a solid campaign.

The Banished Vault is a different type of space tactics game. It’s a gothic fantasy sci-fi roguelike: you are on a flying space monastery, trying to get as far as you can with your dwindling crew and material. You explore solar systems, construct outposts, and find choose-your-own-adventure scenarios with dice throws as you hunt for more crew and material. There’s a lot of maths to crunch with the fiddly resource management, but the hand-drawn art gives it atmosphere.

I’m as surprised as anyone, but I have to give the GOTW to Space Cats Tactics. You can tell from the header image that its graphics aren’t the shiniest, but it’s a Kickstarted game by one person, so I’ll cut it some slack if the tactical stuff holds up. It made a great first impression as the space game I never knew I needed.

Here's the list, in release-date AND alphabetical order!