With the latest Steam Next Fest, we gathered up a selection of the games that caught our attention the most. From anime girl action games to sci-fi hovercraft games, the latest games to preview ran the gamut of genres. Get all of our Steam Next Fest previews below:
夢幻桜楼閣 Demo (Eternal Palace Sakura)
DEVELOPER: Denneko Yuugi
PUBLISHER: Denneko Yuugi, Shochiku
Good models and jiggle physics do not a good game make. A lot of work was put in the animations and … some of the presentation of this game, that much cannot be denied. But everything surrounding those aspects bogs the game down into an unpleasant mess.
The menus and UI in general will require a lot of work to appear functional. Most are clearly unfinished, hardly legible or downright broken. Though it was a neat touch to see the game logo change along with the selected language option.
But worse still is the slow pace of the game between copy-pasted rooms and lack of any hint of a lock-on system. Even in Monster Hunter, your moves didn’t send you 10 feet ahead of your original position.
Given the benefit of the doubt, let’s assume the developer focused on marketability of their product first and left the rest of the game to be ironed out between this demo and a full release.
The annoying anime girl game is available on Steam and will be playable on Windows 10 and 8. That’s what their official site promises, at least.
zakon
DEVELOPER: Mishanya
PUBLISHER: Mishanya
Switching gears to play a functioning hovercraft game, “zakon” is an arcade VTOL hover jet game set in a future Bladerunner-esque soviet-punk world, where the word of glorious leader “Vozd” is law.
Again, the game is influenced by PlayStation era games, resulting in it adopting a pixelated voxel look. While it’s not too painful to look at, after a while the buildings begin to blend together.
The idea of navigating a futuristic city in a fast hovercraft sounds great in theory, but takes a lot of practice to get a hang of in… practice.
Controls are very sensitive and hitting any piece of the world sends you into vomit vision. The short drawing distance doesn’t stop one from thinking of Superman 64 either.
This is a demo, we have to assume that the fact that you can shoot the same statue a hundred times and have it bounce back at you is part of the unfinished work.
Ironically, the deadliest enemies in the game are not the gigantic flesh mutants, nor anything cheesy like “yourself”.
It’s propaganda. Specifically, propaganda floaters, which appear to be the fastest objects in the game, which destroy your ship with a single scratch. That definitely won’t buff out.
If controls weren’t as sensitive as they are, and UI less obnoxious, we would have given this indie title more praise. But the fact of the matter is we had to stop playing because the staff was getting nauseous. I mean… Glory to the Vozd and all 5 voxels of his city!!!
Sydless
DEVELOPER: Opia Games
PUBLISHER: Opia Games
Obnoxiously colored, but fun game. Think Lethal League boomer shooter, but set in a well lit mascot-themed pizzeria.
You jump around, punch a non-euclidean ball and build up a combo to increase its speed and damage. Gameplay is quite engaging and relentless. Bouncing the ball around damages enemies, but they have to be taken out by a direct hit.
Audio mixing is a bit all over the place unless you wear headphones. And even then, it’s still hard to tell where the ball is judging by sound alone.
The colors are oversaturated and loud. We understand it’s supposed to be a pizza place for children, but please – spare our weary eyes. Rogue-like nature leads to a repetitive gameplay loop, needs some tightening.
No V-Sync to get rid of screen tearing. Leans into the “retro vibes” too hard, old CRT displays didn’t have GameBoy-tier ghosting, come on now. We demand realism in this hyper-stylized game!
Menace
DEVELOPER: Overhype Studios
PUBLISHER: Hooded Horse
The 2012 X-Com remake “X-COM: Enemy Unknown” had shown the world that even the most intimidating of franchises can be made appealing to the general ADHD audience without sacrificing too much of its core.
“Menace” aims to remedy the lack of tactical freedom in said remake by introducing new and bringing back some of the old mechanics of the original.
Set in the near future on Mars, players are tasked with executing military operations involving very near future tech. Combining modern day firearms with lasers and walker mechs, along with highly adjustable inventory system, it’s an interesting X-Com/Battlefield 2042 mix.
What isn’t a good mix are the setting and the voicelines. While they’re performed well enough, their overly comedic nature does not jive with the setting. It’s like watching “Saving Private Ryan” with Weird Al playing in the background.
We’re looking forward to turning the “Voices” volume control all the way down and enjoying the full game. SIR, OORAH TO ASHES, SIR!
G-Rebels
DEVELOPER: Reakktor Studios
PUBLISHER: Senatis
The most difficult game to preview is the one you’re unable to play.
G-Rebels, a spiritual successor to G-Police games on the original PlayStation, ships in an unplayable condition. At least it was on our machine ™.
A beautiful game at first glance (and a demanding Unreal Engine 5 resource hog too) is rendered obsolete by its broken controls. Put simply, the game assumed we were pressing “Back”, “Left” and “Up” all the time, making us either fly into the stratosphere or crash into the hangar we just got out of.
The cockpit looked neat, always nice to see player character respond to your control inputs with human gestures, that’s about all we can say. Made a painful memory of HAWKEN reappear in our weary heads though.
The steam user reviews didn’t seem to mention this issue, so it appears to be anecdotal. They did, however, noted that a lot of voice lines were AI generated. And that’s no good.
We ask you to try the demo for yourselves, we’re sure your mileage may vary for the better.
BLOW-UP: Avenge Humanity
DEVELOPER: Half Sunk Games, Llibert_Gamedev
PUBLISHER: Llibert_Gamedev
A not-quite-that-good ULTRAKILL clone. More color, less soul. tultThe indie darling-in-the-making that is ULTRAKILL has made quite a few waves across the internet cosmos. And a popular wave-maker is inevitably subject to imitation. It is a the highest form of flattery, after all.
At least that’s what my copyright lawyer told me when I tried to publish a bold contemporary critique of our current zeitgeist entitled “For whom the bell LOLs”.
This game doesn’t really try to hide its inspiration, it’s all very blatant and matter of fact. The controls are identical, so are the objective and the polycount.
The blood-healing mechanic is gone, opting instead for a fixed 5-hit life bar and regenerating shield. All this does is nudge player into playing defensively. Which kind of defeats the purpose.
All the enemies burst into giant rainbow colored gibs, overwhelming the screen and making it very difficult to discern what the heck is going on. Not dissimilar to the clown blood setting in Serious Sam.
It’s not quite as tight as the original and there are memes present in the game that will no doubt date it with time, but if you want more ULTRAKILL while ULTRAKILL is still in development, go for it. Avenge Humanity.
Stellar Warfare
DEVELOPER: Tense Games
PUBLISHER: Tense Games
Full disclosure: this game did not have a demo on Steam Next Fest. The game is still in the Early Access program, but a demo was made available on itch.io around the same time Next Fest got into full swing of things. So it counts.
Yours truly is a big admirer of the Homeworld franchise. It’s a vast and deep world of intrigue and extremely high stakes, uplifted by spectacular sound design and, ironically, grounded writing.
Yours truly also happens to be incapable of playing RTS games as a result of being a big dumb-dumb.
However developer Tense Games aren’t dumb-dumbs at all and are molding a loving spiritual successor to the Homeworld series or more accurately: a fan-game.
There is an emphasis on base building and searching for stray loot caches. Finding those on the map unlocks random upgrades or modules for your fleet. You can mix and match your setups, so experimentation is encouraged.
The lack of Homeworlds Sensor Manager equivalent (overmap) makes this 6 DOF RTS difficult to navigate, but not unplayable. Some of the UI elements are not scaled properly either. Squinting to read a tiny tool-tip overlayed by a health-bar is unlikely to keep players’ blood pumping.
Your truly wishes he was a smarter man to fully appreciate a love-letter like this. There were a few “Homeworld moments” during our playtime, where one gets lost in the sauce in awe of the majestic space fleet zeroing in on its target.
Check out the demo on itch.io and if you like it, do consider joining the Patreon, we have a starving artist situation going on over here.
What games caught your interest from the latest Steam Next Fest offerings? Did we miss any? Make sure to comment below or shoot us an email with games we could have missed!
