Alpha Beta Gamer

Next Car Game is a great looking destruction heavy racing game with amazing environmental destruction, sophisticated physics-based driving dynamics and damage models. It comes from Bugbear, developers of FlatOut and the recent Ridge Racer Unbounded, both games known for their high levels of destruction, but Next Car Game looks like it’s taking carnage to a whole new level.

Even though it’s only a tech demo, it’s still great fun. It’s just you, the car, and big playground to full of things to bash, jump, and destroy. The sheer amount of destruction on offer is fantastic and it does a great job of showcasing the game engines’ capabilities. Bugbear may not of come up with a proper name for their game yet, but they have come up with the foundations of a very good game.

Play the Tech Demo, Free

Dead Pixels 2 is a bigger and better follow-up to Dead Pixels, a fun retro side-scrolling action game, with zombies. The Devs compare Dead Pixels 2 to the Evil Dead 2 - improving upon the flaws of the original Dead Pixels and use an actual budget to make sure the whole thing is polished, not a remake, but not a sequel and superior to the original in every way.

Dead Pixels 2 features some wonderful pixel art graphics, branching paths, loot, lots of weaponry and a variety of RPG elements - such as cash, XP, shops, abilities and Skills to level up. It’s great fun to play and has a distinctive 80’s style to it, full of garish colours, plenty of neon, retro graphics and even a VHS-style screen filter complete with scan lines and tracking issues. It also features an AI director which assesses how well the player was doing and adjusts the game to suit, allowing for consistently challenging gameplay.

While Dead Pixels 2 may look like a simple retro side scrolling brawler with guns, there’s a remarkable amount of depth to the gameplay. It’s reminiscent of the recent Scot Pilgrim Vs The World game, but with zombies, shotguns and a dash of 80’s awesome.

Play the Beta Demo, Free

Apexicon is a fun word based puzzle RPG, with upgrades, special moves and a surprisingly enjoyable story.

At it’s core, the aim is to make words that are as long as possible form the selection of letters available, then ‘attack’ your opponent, dealing damage equal to the length of the word. It’s a good system, with added depth thanks to the green healing letters and special moves.

The game allows you to upgrade and fully customise your character using with ‘INK’ that is won through matches. You’ll also be able to manage the town, build friendships with NPCs and take part in side quests. The character drawings, and voice acting are both well done and do a good job of pulling you into the games intriguing story that promises multiple endings.

Apexicon is a simple and enjoyable puzzle game wrapped up in an interesting story and a wide array of RPG elements. Definitely worth checking out if your a fan of word games, especially Boggle.

Download the Alpha, Free

Playtown is a colourful and cheerful Multiplayer Virtual World where you can visit real world locations reimagined with a unique toony look and, socialise and play games with friends.

It’s a lively and enjoyable experience, with lots of minigames (Basketball, backgammon and darts for example), vehicles to ride, objectives and dynamic quests. You can also customise yuour character with an extensive selection of clothing, and customise your own apartment with furnitures, mini-games, YouTube TVs, music streaming Stereos and custom image frames.

Playtown is a pleasant place to visit, a cheerful world with plenty of interesting distractions, an MMO made for just hanging out and having fun with friends.

Play the Beta, Free

Alpha Sign-ups are now open for Fortnight, Epic’s new Unreal Engine 4 powered multiplayer game where you scavenge and fortify during the day and fight off zombie hordes during the night.

Fortnite has a big focus on building, combat, character customization and social interaction. The day and night cycles mean that gameplay will have an interesting mixture of exploring, scavenging, building during daylight, then bunkering down during the night and fending off zombies as it switches to a Gears of War, Horde-mode style of gameplay.

The interesting cycle of gameplay styles, stylish visuals and the fact that this will be Epic’s first Unreal Engine 4 powered game all make Fortnite sound like a pretty tasty proposition, and a game that’s worth getting on at the ground floor.

Sign Up for the Alpha

DreadOut is a very creepy 3rd person adventure horror with a sinister vibe similar to Asian horror classics like The Ring or Ju-On: The Grudge. You play as Linda, a school girl who gets separated from the rest of the students on a high school trip which has taken an unexpected detour into an old deserted town. This results in you roaming this creepy town on your own, with only the camera on your cell phone to fend off the freaky Asian ghosts, taking pictures a-la Fatal Frame/Project Zero to capture/kill them.

The Alpha Demo is a short half hour taster of what the full game will be, and while the controls can be a little clunky at times, but it’s consistently scary. As surreal, tense and freaky as any of the great Asian horror movies, DreadOut offers up some truly terrifying jump scares in it’s short play time.

Download the Alpha Demo, Free (Win, Mac & Linux)

Grave is a surreal, open-world, procedural survival horror game, with day & night cycles playing a big roll. During the day, you search for anything to help you survive, and explore to find new areas, during the night, you try to survive using light sources you’ve scavenged, and explore if you’re brave enough.

In Grave, you don’t have guns or knifes to survive but you use light as a way to defend and eliminate the creatures that’s out to get you. This was done in Alan Wake previously, but here the light-as-a-weapon theme is far superior, with no need for guns to finish off enemies and you can use various different light sources – like putting oil on the ground and setting fire to it with matches.

It’s an atmospheric horror game with a lots of inventive ways to play, the game is scariest in the beginning, more so than later on when hordes of monsters show up, but that’s where the survival gameplay comes into play – a little less frightening, but just as fun. With Oculus Rift Support, you can play the game in full VR if you really want to freak yourself out though!

Download the Alpha, Free

Visions shouldn’t really be viewed as a game, more as an album. An album of 9 excellent chilled-out electronica songs (reminiscent of Moby & Daft Punk at times), each one wrapped in a completely different, visually stunning level.

The gameplay itself is pretty basic, you just have to float around the levels picking up enough crystals to move on to the next one, with the timer being the length of the song. There are star ratings for how many crystals you manage to collect, but you’ll just get stressed out if you try and collect them all, defeating the object of the game. It’s much better just to swoop around the levels, collecting enough crystals to allow you to reach the next level then just relaxing and enjoying the audio/visual experience.

The full game lasts around 40 mins (the length of an album), with each song and level working beautifully together, with the level design throwing up some nice surprises along the way. The basic gameplay means that it’s technically not a great game, but as an audio/visual experience, it’s fantastic. Turn up the volume.

Download the Alpha, Free

At Alpha Beta Gamer, we realise that a lot of our followers stream the games that we feature, so we thought it would be a good idea to get you all together in the same place - The Alpha Beta Gamer Twitch Page!
If your stream regularly covers games...

At Alpha Beta Gamer, we realise that a lot of our followers stream the games that we feature, so we thought it would be a good idea to get you all together in the same place - The Alpha Beta Gamer Twitch Page!

If your stream regularly covers games that are still in development and you’d like to add your Twitch Stream to our page, just e-mail us at admin(at)alphabetagamer(dot)com with a brief description and your Twitch feed details. Feeds will be cycled on a weekly basis, so everyone should get equal exposure. We also plan to add a YouTube page in the near future.

For more info check out the new Alpha Beta Gamer Twitch Page

Grand Theft Flying Object (GTFO) is a 4 player local co-op game that encourages (not intentionally) frantic, bad teamwork. You and your friends are all stuck controlling a single ship and must work together to manoeuvre through the environment and fight off oncoming enemies. As the name implies, you steal another flying ship when your ship is about to be destroyed, each time you change ships you’ll have to learn how to fly them, as different ships handle differently. It thrives on the organised chaos that ensues when multiple people are forced to work together to fly a single ship.

The game was a university project developed by students and is now owned by the university, with the developers moving on to something else, so the game will probably never be completed. This is a shame as cooperative play in the game is great fun, it plays well and has a wonderful art style.

Download the alpha/prototype build

Posts tagged PC