Freelance writer, player of games, writer of words, recorder of videos and tabletop role-playing aficionado.
Shovel Knight was one of the most popular and well-received indie games of the last several years, lovingly ripping off NES-era pixels and gameplay.
With fun abilities, excellent level designs, and a charming art style, I’m declaring Kunai the Shovel Knight of 2020, though Kunai shoulders the much more expansive (and oft-overused) genre of metroidvania, and not without some significant growing pains.
My mage and rogue creep through a patch of tall wheat fields before stumbling into a gigantic steampunk soldier, who brutally cuts my team down in a hail of machine gun fire. Instead of grunting through a Game Over screen or reloading a save, I enter Trance Mode and slide back in time several seconds, just before my terrible blunder.
“It’s like Save Scumming: The Game,” says Antti Kemppainen, game designer for Iron Danger. The tactical RPG, from Finnish developer Action Squad Studios, is built around a unique form of quick-loading that’s more interactive than mashing F9, thanks to a little time magic. It’s like editing a video of your game while you’re playing it.
In many ways Planet Zoo is a successful combination of Frontier Developments’ last two games: Planet Coaster and Jurassic World Evolution. The sim park management and robust construction tools from Planet Coaster are all here, but we’re trading in our Teacups and Giga Coasters for African Buffalo and Reticulated Giraffes. As in Jurassic World Evolution, these animals have a complex list of social, environmental, and dietary needs, and taking care of them is the most important element of running a successful zoo.
There are ten different Pagan Online classes, each of whom encourage wildly different playstyles. In the beginning you can only unlock a single hero, but each additional character costs one hero soul from the increasingly challenging list of assassination missions.
Knowing which heroes you want to unlock first makes a major difference, so we’re here to break down each class in Pagan Online, including their strengths, difficulty, and their best moves to help you hack-and-slash through the endless enemy hordes.
I adore Gloomhaven, the tabletop game. It’s a tactical RPG in board and card form, and has been the best board game on BoardGameGeek since 2017. Gloomhaven captures the turn-based combat and progression of Dungeons & Dragons along with unlockable hidden classes, a huge campaign of nearly 100 scenarios, over three dozen monsters and bosses, and a Choose Your Own Adventure story with multiple avenues and choices. I’ve completed dozens of scenarios and sunk well over a hundred hours, and now I’m starting over with the new digital version on Steam.
Killsquad looks and loots like the lovechild of Diablo and Destiny and plays like a co-op MOBA. It hit Steam Early Access this week as an action-RPG for up to four players, drenched in a hellish sci-fi theme that could almost be a Doom spin-off with some of its demonic alien creatures. The fast-paced action is easy to jump into, with gorgeous art design, fun attacks, and, refreshingly, zero microtransactions.
I was surrounded on all sides. I’d managed to rescue the prisoner, but now we had to fight our way back out of the dungeon. Reinforcements poured in from the south, so I sent my beleaguered party north. When we made it to a room with pressure plates and fireball-spewing statues, more reinforcements spawned at the entrance and quickly closed in.
What followed was a harrowing, tense turn, as I carefully positioned my warden for a whirlwind strike, blasted out a fireball with my acolyte, and tried to figure out what I could do with a useless unarmed prisoner. That’s when I remembered the pressure plates, and smiled as I noticed the bad guys were standing pretty close to those statues. He may have been unarmed, but his legs were working just fine.
That wasn’t the first dungeon escapade I just barely scraped through in Druidstone: The Secret of Menhir Forest, a new tactical RPG from the creators of Legend of Grimrock.
![Kunai Review [Pixelkin]](https://roguewatson.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/kunai.jpg?w=1000)
![Rewind Time in Upcoming Tactical RPG Iron Danger [PC Gamer]](https://roguewatson.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/iron-danger-e3-2019-1.jpg?w=1200)
![Planet Zoo Beta Preview [Pixelkin]](https://roguewatson.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/planet-zoo.jpg?w=970)
![Pagan Online Hero Guide [PC Gamer]](https://roguewatson.files.wordpress.com/2019/08/pagan-online-character-pic.jpg?w=1200)
![Gloomhaven Steam Early Access Impressions [PC Gamer]](https://roguewatson.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/gloomhaven-steam.jpg?w=1200)
![Diablo Meets Destiny with action-RPG Killsquad [PC Gamer]](https://roguewatson.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/killsquad.jpg?w=1200)
![The Legend of Grimrock devs on Druidstone, their new tactical RPG [PC Gamer]](https://roguewatson.files.wordpress.com/2019/05/druidstone_background_with_logo-1024x576.png?w=1024){kind=logo}
