With such an established format as the visual novel, games now quite often look to break outside of the text-heavy storytelling with snippets of other gameplay genres  that help break up the monotony of tapping endlessly through often unvoiced dialogue. Some of my favourite games of this style, VA-11 HALL-A and Coffee Talk, let you mix drinks and brew beverages between conversations, and that blend of interaction creates such a unique connection with the game and it’s characters. Tavern Talk takes that formula and steeps it in high-fantasy, but with a uniquely modern and tabletop-inspired voice that makes it one of the most unique takes on a Dungeons & Dragons style setting I’ve seen in gaming.

In Tavern Talk, your humble inn and drinkery serves as a hub for adventurers, warriors, and pretty much anyone else to gather at. Some are looking for rest after a tough battle, others are sharing quests they need party members for, and a few just need a refreshing beverage and someone to talk to.

On the surface, a lot of these characters are pretty standard fantasy stereotypes – your pale blonde elves, your stout dwarf warriors, your aloof assassins and so on – but what makes all of them so interesting is that they aren’t characterised and written like typically stoic fantasy heroes. Instead, their casual tone and quite literal adherence to things like the D&D alignment chart make them feel more like a real persons tabletop character mid-session. It helps them come to life in a much more interesting fashion, and leads to fun moments where you might see two characters with very different personalities instantly connect on a subject because of their placements on the alignment chart – you can even check this in-game through your journal.

When one of these characters visits your shop, they’ll ask you to make a drink for them. On top of general preferences for flavour or style, your patrons will also have stat-related needs that your concoction has to help with, requiring you to brew something that boosts strength, charisma, dexterity, intelligence, or defence.

The act of brewing a beverage isn’t very complicated, and I have mixed feelings about that. On one hand, the simplistic nature of the drink-mixing gameplay makes it easier to vibe with the story and follow it without interruption, but on the other hand, it gets so repetitive so quickly. Despite unlocking new recipes drink modifiers as the game goes on, your patrons will almost always stick to their same usual favourites. A more challenging version of the drink mixing would make your bond with the patrons and the info and rumors they share with you feel so much more earned and meaningful.

Once you learn enough info or rumours from various patrons, you can piece them together and post an open quest on your taverns’ quest-board to let any of your patrons tackle the adventure. This also isn’t as difficult or open-ended as I would have liked. There isn’t a lot of variety or meaningful experimentation that goes into putting these quests, or the drinks your patrons need before tackling them, together. The idea of your interactions with your shop visitors culminating in these big quests is interesting, but it already lacks some oomph since you don’t get to witness the quests at all – the lack of challenge in putting them together makes the most impactful moments of the game fall a bit flat.

Still, there’s a lot of charm and wonderful world-building to Tavern Talk that make it a worthwhile experience despite a lack of gameplay depth. The game is full of diverse, interesting, and engaging characters, and even the patrons who I despised for their rancid vibes or twisted personalities made for really interesting interactions. The world needs more drink-mixing visual novels, and Tavern Talk is a welcome, if slightly flawed, addition to that niche subgenre.

There’s a minimalist approach to storytelling that a lot of metroidvania games traditionally take, letting their world speak for itself and typically telling the rest of the story through text boxes and an occasional character sprite. Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune aims for loftier narrative goals with a load of fully animated cutscenes that place the characters and their adventures on equal footing with the importance of the side-scrolling exploration and action. Unfortunately, these moments are so rough and shoddy that they ultimately bring an otherwise decent gaming experience down several notches.

Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune is a mish-mash of fantasy and sci-fi tropes run through an anime filter, and that grab bag honestly leads to some interesting ideas. Your protagonist is Erza, an Imperial Hunter aboard a cruising skyship heading to an unexplored region. Despite her calm & cool appearance, her introductory cutscene has her livestreaming from her bedroom about planet ecology to her fans and getting embarrassed when her dad shows up in the stream chat. Alongside her, you also get to play as minigun-wielding and Erza-obsessed fangirl Ciara as well as masked fighter Nia.

Hot-swapping between three playable characters at any time adds a lot of fun new layers to the metroidvania action that I was really impressed by. Each character has their own specialisation, and plenty of new weapons to equip and abilities to unlock that help diversify their playstyles even more.

I struggled to lose myself in the fun of these characters and the multi-biome sprawling map they explore, though, because of how frequently the game comes to a halt to dish out an unremarkable cutscene. While character models in Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune look fine enough from afar, they’re much less impressive to look at in dynamic, close-up cutscenes, and their animation is distractingly robotic. It’s hard enough to care about these moments when they look so rough, but a lot of the writing in them isn’t anything memorable either – for some players, the heavy reliance on goofy and fanservice-y anime tropes in these scenes won’t do them any favours either.

Lackluster cutscenes aside, there’s a comfortable, cheesy charm to Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune that I really do appreciate. Attack animations are far sharper than what you witness in story scenes, and while some of them lack weight or oomph, the sheer volley of wild particle effects and glowing projectiles that sputter out every time you land an attack or dish out a super move are just fun as hell.

Plus, the wealth of customisation in the game really helps make it worth seeing things through to the end – from equipment-enhancing orbs dropped by enemies to new abilities that grant access to locked parts of the map, and even a huge variety of costumes for each character, it always feels like you’re unlocking something new and shiny that helps keep your attention even through the lowest points of the game.

Frontier Hunter: Erza’s Wheel of Fortune isn’t setting a new bar for metroidvanias by any means – but it’s gaming comfort food that’ll feel easy to sink your teeth into if you’re a fan of that kind of atmosphere. Even the most patient of corny game enthusiasts will likely be put off by how frequent, unpolished, and often unskippable the cutscenes in this game are though.

The Earth Defense Force series has always embraced the inherit silliness of its alien-blasting premise – any action game that prioritises singing alongside gunplay, definitely doesn’t take itself too seriously. For EDF 6, that embrace has become an aggressive yet surprisingly tender cuddle, and it is, without doubt, the most bombastically bonkers and brilliant EDF yet.

For those who have never played an EDF game before, the set-up is simple enough. You and your team of fellow players (four players online or two via local split-screen) must shoot your way through each level from a third-person perspective, clearing the mountains, cityscapes, and fields of their alien invaders. Foes are many and varied, from hordes of giant ants to armoured gun-toting anthropomorphic frogs and swarms of deadly flying drones. Levels are fairly small environments and can be played in no more than fifteen minutes, ensuring the pace of the game is fast, frenetic, and highly addictive, not least because the combat is completely over-the-top explosive madness. Let’s face it, blowing an alien soldier through the side of a building with an enormous rocket and then seeing the rubble to collapse on their prone form will always be a delight.

There are four different player characters to choose from: an all-purpose Ranger, a flying jet-pack equipped Wing-Diver, a support-calling Air Raider, and a heavily armed and armoured Fencer. There have been a few tweaks made to each class, though nothing earth-shaking. Rangers continue to be the best all-rounder, their ability to deploy more vehicles to drive is a welcome addition. Wing-Divers meanwhile have a far more generous energy meter from the offset, allowing the player to fly to the top of a tower and rain down laser beam hell on the enemy below. Air-Raiders now utilise drones to deploy most of their attacks, ensuring a huge amount of weapon and item variety for players prepared to take on the challenge of not using any proper guns. Finally, Fencers remain reliable in their four weapons totting combo, though with a notable improvement in manoeuvrability. In short, it’s the same set of characters that you know and love, just slightly better.

There are literally hundreds of weapons to choose from, giving almost impossible amounts of variety. Laser guns, grenades, bazookas, missile launchers, mech suits, EDF 6 has it all.  Of course, this being an EDF game, far too many of them are utter pants and will only ever be used once before being discarded for a trusty shotgun. The trial-and-error approach is all part of the fun, as is bringing completely the wrong weapon for a level and being unable to kill any aliens – levels with unexpected flying creatures, I’m looking at you. Still, does it make me sound weird to say that I like all that stuff? That all this clunkiness adds to the very particular charm of an EDF game?

In fact, a huge part of the charm of Earth Defense Force is its slightly shonky quality. Whilst EDF 6 certainly makes the most of its generational leap – the armies of enemies you face are vast and screen-filling in their numbers and the draw-distance goes for miles – it also retains the ramshackle look that so appeals to the franchise’s ardent fanbase. Take the graphical detail as an example, though the visuals are far more polished, a few frames of animation are still missing from each player character and enemy model, keeping the B-movie-inspired aesthetic from previous games.

That’s not to say that a whole host of improvements haven’t been made elsewhere, because they have. Vehicles, the bane of a player’s existence in EDF 5, have been drastically improved. It may not sound like much to those who aren’t devoted members of the force, but bikes, tanks, and helicopters are now actually controllable. In the last game, daring to clamber atop a motorbike would be met with shame-faced hilarity as you immediately skidded out of control and embedded yourself in a skyscraper. Meanwhile, helicopters would crash as soon as you even thought about steering them. In EDF 6 all these problems have been fixed, and I delighted in zooming around on my bike like an extra from Akira, shredding giant spiders with my twin machine guns before pirouetting away to make my escape in a cloud of dust. It’s glorious!

Player control has been sorted out too, with your avatar happily, and automatically, clambering over any obstacles they encounter, rendering those many moments your hulking soldier was trapped behind a particularly prominent piece of pavement a thing of the past.

Talking of the past, the time-travel-based Terminator 2-like plot is surprisingly decent and cram-packed with plenty of twists and turns. Sure, it is utter nonsense, but it is oddly compelling nonsense. However, it’s likely to be more meaningful to those who have played through EDF 5, for which EDF 6 is a direct continuation.

This direct sequel approach has given developer Sandlot a decent excuse to revisit levels and reuse art assets from the last game. Swathes of levels are lifted directly from EDF 5, though this time there are time-traveling aliens altering the time-space continuum to contend with. A level that you had previously played to death is suddenly turned on its head when enormous grenade-totting androids turn up. It has led to what is the biggest EDF yet, and true EDFers already know that 100% completion will involve playing through each level multiple times with every character anyway.

As proudly individual as each game in the SteamWorld series is, sometimes you just want a good old fashioned sequel, a game that goes back over familiar ground and tries to make things bigger and better. With close to a decade since the original, it feels like high time that Thunderful return to one of their most popular entries with the side-scrolling turn-based action of SteamWorld Heist 2.

Where the first Heist was a space-faring jaunt in junky steampunk ships, SteamWorld Heist 2 throws you right into the midsts of a great ecological crisis threatening its watery world where boats and subs are the order of the day. Oh sure, it’s already just a fragment of a planet hurtling through space, but where now Steambots are struggling to find clean water, afflicting them with Rust, and there’s literally just one ship’s captain who’s got a hope of unpicking the mystery of what’s going on. Captain Leeway steps into the breach – no, not “Krakenbane” herself, but her son – or at least, he would do, but at the start of the game, he’s very much down on his luck, his inherited submarine having been confiscated and having lost his good arm for shooting.

So the game opens with an introductory mission with his last two trusty crew members embarking on an audacious mission to steal his submarine back, facing off against the Dieselbots of the Royal Navy to do so. This personal task successfully completed, and Captain Leeway is thrust into continuing his campaign against the Dieselbots, the mysteriously bony Rattlers, and trying to get to the bottom of what’s giving all the Steambots a nasty case of Rust – hint, it’s the salty water.

Just as before, SteamWorld Heist 2 is XCOM given the Flat Stanley treatment. Instead of commanding your handful of crew members through 3D spaces, you’ve got a side-on view of every combat location. It’s a nice and permissive kind of turn-based tactical battling though, letting you aim and shoot through the cover you’re hiding behind and past allies, through thinner gantry-like flooring, and using ricochets to hit enemies who are in cover themselves. And instead of aim being a percentage based roll of the dice, it’s more like Worms in that you have to line up your shot and then time it with the natural sway of the weapon – It helps greatly that one of your first characters is a sniper, which gives you a laser sight that even shows bullet bounces.

SteamWorld Heist 2 comes with a new Jobs system for classes, though, all dependent on which primary weapon is equipped. There’s no limitations to Job switching, and as soon as you’ve gained a level in one role, those skills can then be unlocked for another role by assigning Cogs. The Flanker and Brawler are easy to synergise, giving a melee character much enhanced movement, while you could turn your Sniper into a backline support with cover building and team healing abilities from the Engineer.

The deeper you get into the game, the more weapons and gear that you’ll earn, and there’s further avenues to upgrade your characters and roster as a whole. Higher levelled weapons will dish out more damage, and there’s also Epic weapons with special effects, like a sniper with electric discharge, or a crossbow for the Reaper instead of an SMG.

There’s some great nuances to explore here, especially as you need to make the very most of every advantage your get on higher difficulties, and there’s missions that will hew toward one style of play or another. Compared to the original, level layouts are now fixed, but with randomised cover and enemies, so you have much more repeatable experiences than the more broadly procedural levels of before. That leads to missions where, confronted with countless Rattler totems and a secondary objective not to destroy any of them yourself, you’ll need precision and minimal ricochets – it took me a few tries. And then there’s just stages that are designed for varying team sizes.

Another big area that SteamWorld Heist 2 improves upon is with everything between missions. Yes, there’s downtime at safe havens and bars, where you can rest up to get to the next day, shop for better gear and chat to NPCs – you’ll also get the luxurious vocal harmonies of the original songs by Steam Powered Giraffe stuck in your head – but then there’s the neat open world to sail around to get to each location, and enemy ships to battle.

The submarine is pretty weak to start off, but with weapon mounts to the side, front and top, as well as more unlockable slots for upgrades, it can become a pretty fierce little thing, capable of taking on enemy capital ships. That’s especially true because of how agile it is with responsive arcade handling, not to mention the upgrade to let you dive beneath the surface – where you’ll come to find other subs and mines. It’s a fun diversion between the sometimes gruelling battles.

By default, the game comes at you with the Experienced difficulty level, and through the opening regions, that’s pretty straightforward to handle. However, the Rattlers can really swarm you and levels often have enemy spawn points that make you scramble and rush just to survive – by the third or fourth region the difficulty had really stepped up a few notches. Thankfully the difficulty is customisable beyond the fistful of presets, and a checkpoint system mid-level lets you roll back up to two turns if you want to slap yourself for a dumb move or fluffed shot.

Sometimes a game doesn’t need an engrossing story or compelling main characters. Sometimes, you just want to go from virtual arena to virtual arena and take out enemies with an assortment of weapons, tools and abilities. This is what Deadlink offers. It is a roguelike first-person shooter set in a cyberpunk world where corporations are more powerful than governments, and have the violent means to hold onto that power. You are a brain in a jar that can be transferred to different combat shells, using their skills in a VR setting to test their capabilities against those corpo assets.

From the off, you can see Deadlink has a lot of depth to it. You’ll be repeating runs to earn experience and points, allowing you to unlock new skills and abilities while making progress across levels to unlock the other three ‘shells’ to shove your brain into. The default Soldier shell is not all it’s cracked up to be, and while it suits the first area it is the least fun to use. It comes equipped with a shotgun and rocket launcher, while the abilities include a rappel that can hook onto surfaces and enemies, and a Scrambler that marks and staggers foes. The Hunter shell is more entertaining to use, coming equipped with a Hand Cannon and Arc Cannon, as well as the translocator ability, which swaps your position with a normal enemy as well as marking and stunning them. The next shell is the Decoy which leaves behind a hologram that enemies target while you stay invisible for a bit, but it’s far from being the most fun to use.

That title goes to the Engineer, which comes equipped with a Gauss automatic rifle and a grenade launcher. The Engineer’s deeply enjoyable abilities include being able to deploy a turret, and use a wormlink that can link to enemies marking and incapacitating them. Finally, there’s the Juggernaut, armed with a sawed-off shotgun and a flak cannon, with a Graviton Punch ability which can destroy some enemies in one hit, and Stray Redirector which makes the shell invulnerable for a bit, but sacrifices movement speed. While I did experiment with all the shells, it was Engineer I kept going back to, though Hunter, Juggernaut, and Soldier all offered something different to enjoy.

The combat shells are just one small part of what Deadlink offers. Once you’ve selected your shell, you’ll eventually have three modes open up. The Campaign challenges you to move through four stages, each made up of rooms and with a boss waiting at the end. Time Attack offers courses that will test your reactions, and there’s the Extant Existence mode which is an unlimited wave mode, where you try to survive against enemies for as long as possible. Unlike many Roguelikes, the rooms themselves are set so you can learn enemy spawn patterns, but the challenge will always be different due to your implants. Implants and room transitions is where the Roguelike elements of Deadlink come in.

Deadlink’s implant system is the anchor of the Roguelike, making  you consider their strategies on every run. As you progress through each arena you may get the chance to equip an implant, or make adjustments to weapons and the shell. These can be anything from adding fire or toxic damage to your gun, making your abilities more powerful, or improving the amount of health and shield you have. You won’t know what implant will be offered so you really are coming up with your approach on the fly. The implants themselves have different tiers, and need different amounts of power, which you can see in the equip screen. Legendary implants require the most power as they offer the best advantages, for example, providing a combat drone to assist.

The power management is easy to figure out, as rows on menu show how much battery power is needed for a slot to be used. Furthermore, implants are split into active and passive. Active implants demand action being taken by you, like activating an ability, or breaking the C-balls that are floating around the arena, while passive implants are always on in the background. There are dozens of implants to find and unlock, with more being made available as you level up. I have to say, my best run came from having a majority of passive implants, as then I could just focus more on running and gunning.

The levelling up system has its own depth with upgrades available for individual shells, as well as general upgrades that improve health, shields, unlock new tiers of weapon mods, upgrades, and more permanent buffs or abilities, such as the defibrillator which will revive you once on a run. Some upgrades require experience points to unlock, while others require Turing Tokens, with the better ones requiring both. Experience is earned through playing the levels, while Turing Tokens can be found as one of the offers at the end of an arena, or through defeating bosses.

All of these in-depth systems of implants and levelling feed into the main experience. Deadlink only has four overall stages, split into combat arenas, but with the challenge you will not get past the first two, Tora and Watts, without significant experience and upgrades. The action is very fast paced, and you are almost always moving to avoid incoming attacks while firing off your own, but it does start to feel a bit repetitive as you go through the same levels trying to move further. There are no surprises waiting for you in the initial runs most of the time, though occasionally you will need to survive for 45 seconds, which isn’t a huge challenge, or break corrupt C-Balls. To unlock the higher difficulties you also need to complete runs on the lower difficulty, which does give something to aim for but also risks you burning out.