25th of February, 2021
Hello! Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time we’ve been picking over a few more of the games available in the Steam Next Fest.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.
Scathe, PC
Remember when FPS games were called Doomlikes? Scathe is a Doomlike – and then some. You get dropped into horrible caverns filled with awful beasts, you have a gun that you don’t need to reload, and there’s a score counter boldly placed on the UI. Keep the combo going.
Inevitably, it’s brilliant: lovely gunplay and hideous monsters enlivened by a dash move that encourages you to gib with a bit of extra speed. You know, like Doom!
Best thing about this, though? There is a button just for wiping the gore off your face. That’s cool. That’s Doom – and then some.
Legendary Hoplite, PC
Legendary Hoplite drops you into Ancient Greece for a sort of tactics, action, puzzley thing. It’s going to be great, I suspect, even if the current demo does take a while to make that point.
You patrol the bottom of the screen while enemies come from the top. Skeletons. Armoured skeletons. Wolves. You manage a stamina meter while you move about and chuck spears at them. But as things evolve you can also spend mana on buying troop units to block some of the lanes for a limited time. And then there are special moves. And pretty soon you’re managing mana and stamina while hell rains down from above.