Alpha Beta Gamer

Excubitor is a great new futuristic shoot-em-up/horde mode/tower defence hybrid that sees you in control of a space fighter fighting off wave after wave of enemies, intent on destroying your base.

It’s an interesting mix of genres and works really well. In the first level your ship can boost around the map, meeting enemies head-on, strafing circles around them and blowing them out the sky, proving the old adage – attack is the best form of defence. Once you complete the level or die, the resources you collected during the last level can be used to buy upgrades for your ship, the shop is quite bare at the moment, but we’d expect it to fill out as the game development progresses.

Once you progress past the first (rather tricky) level you’ll have the ability to build turrets and activate defences, adding a tower defence mechanic to the game. This allows Excubitor to support different playstyles, allowing you to either upgrade your ship and take on the enemy head-on, or build more turrets at your base and bunker down.

Still in its early stages of development, Excubitor is already great fun, the ship handles well and it’s a satisfying feeling darting around the map, protecting your base from enemies. You’ll be able to chart the game’s progress too as each week the devs will be posting a new build with new features and improvements based on your opinions.

Download the Alpha, Free

Quantum Rush is a great looking futuristic arcade racer, in a similar vein as WipEout and F-Zero, but with gigantic tracks, online comunity features and fully customisable/upgradable ships with unique special abilities.

The ships all handle well, and hurtle around at break-neck speeds, it also features WipEout-style power-ups scattered across tracks, which makes for some pretty hectic multiplayer races. The tracks are also all well designed, and with plenty of variety, whether your hurtling around a futuristic cityscape or a dusty canyon, it’s consistently visually engaging. It’s a great futuristic racer, that’s very fast, very pretty, and lots of fun.

The Developers are planning on hosting a Devs Vs Beta Tester Tournament tomorrow. All you have to do (once you’re in the Beta) to take part in this event is to log in and join matchmaking for Death Race on tier 1 at Friday, 21/3/2014, at 4:00 p.m. (CET). For the YouTubers amongst you, you’re all allowed to record the event and publish videos about it as you see fit.

Sign up for the Beta

UPDATE:
Quantum Rush has now gone into Open Beta, so everyone can now strap themselves in for some fast, futuristic racing action.

Join in the Beta, Free

Superfighters Deluxe is a fun multi-player 2D platform shooter akin to Smash Bros or Crash Commando that features little men shooting, stabbing, mashing, smashing, burning and blowing each other into tiny bits. It’s a bigger, better version of the original Superfighters, offering online multiplayer, improved melee combat, more character cutomisation and lots of other new features.

Fights are generally quite short affairs, starting with a dash to pick up the weapons that are scattered across the level, then all out war as all 8 players fight for their survival, with the last man standing being crowned the winner. The retro graphical style and customisation options add a lot of charm, while the levels are well designed, looking like 1 screen pieces of pixel-art, scattered with explosives and destructible scenery. It’s a fun game filled with a plenty of chaos and there’s always plenty of games ongoing, so you won’t be short of people to play with.

Play the Pre-Alpha, Free

Stones Of Sorrow is an ultra-violent action-roguelike based on historical cave paintings with cooldown based combat mechanics and buckets of blood (or paint).

The levels in Stones of Sorrow are all procedurally generated, with you having to pay a gatekeeper with gold to get lower into the cave. You’ll find some of this gold scattered throughout the levels, but you’ll earn most of it through killing enemies. This gold also comes in handy when you die, through a nice Rogue Legacy-style perks system that allows you to purchase upgrades that will aid your next playthrough.

Enemies tend to continually spawn from set locations, causing them to bunch up together in large groups which you can then run into and wipe out in a huge bloodbath. You can also use bombs which can be bought from a shop, or grab and execute an enemy for a nice +666 gold bonus. The combat system takes a little getting used to as every move (even crawl) has a cooldown period with a count-down at the bottom of the screen indicating when you can use them again. Once you figure it out though, it’s great fun, and adds a tactical element to the fighting.

The current build is still early in development and contains 1 level, 1 weapon, 4 enemy types, 3 different executions on one enemy, 6 stat changing items, a trader, a gatekeeper and lots of violence. The full game will contain at least 10 levels, 20 weapons, 15 brutal executions, 23 enemy types, 60 stat changing items, many different traders, eating corpses, weapon modifying and a story about a power struggle within an ancient tribe.

Coming to Windows, Mac & Linux, Stones of Sorrow has just started an IndieGoGo campaign with a very modest €4,000 Goal. Contributors who pay €4 or more will get access to the full blood-soaked version when it’s released.

Play the Alpha, Free

If you can give this game a suitable name you can win an OUYA

Indie Devs, Gamious, are holding a name the game competition for their unnamed physics based puzzle/platrormer featuring a size-changing neon ball coming to Ouya, iOS, Android & PC. The game is a lot of fun, and tests your reflexes and puzzle solving skills, with the size-changing game mechanic being used to great effect, with size changes also affecting your mass and momentum.

Once you’ve played the teaser demo you can tweet your submissions to Gamious. One entry a day will be selected to win a gamecode for the finished game (Ouya or mobile devices), with the best 3 entries throughout the competition winning an Ouya, controller and a copy of the game. All (sensible) entries will also get their name in the credits.

Play the Teaser Demo and submit your name entries

Aaru’s Awakening is a fantastic 2D action platformer with a beautiful hand drawn art style inspired by 70s animation films. You play as Aaru, the champion of dawn, a muscular beast who must travel through the domains of Dawn, Day, Dusk and Night and defeat the Night deity who has upset the balance in the world of Lumenox.

The big draw of Aaru’s Awakening is obviously that gorgeous hand drawn art style, with with the backdrops, character animations and special effects all combining to make the game look and feel like a high quality anime cartoon. The art style adds a wonderfully dreamy atmosphere to the game, which is exacerbated by the excellent, euphoric soundtrack.

As well as looking unique, Aaru’s Awakening shows inovaion in gameplay too. Utilising an Abuse-style control scheme, Aaru can aim and fire his soul into the world, ricocheting off walls then teleporting to where it lands. It’s a great mechanic that opens adds a lot of depth and some puzzle based elements to to game.

The Alpha Demo features 4 levels, and is a good taster for what Aaru’s Awakening has to offer. An excellent action platformer with some truly stunning scenery.

Download the Alpha Demo, Free

Black Ice is an excellent hacking-based cyberpunk roguelike FPS RPG set in a computer mainframe, with Tron-like neon visuals and lots of Diablo-style loot.

We first covered Black Ice around 6 months ago when it was in Alpha, but with the newly gameplay improvements and the start of the Steam Greenlight campaign, we thought it time for an update.

When you start the game, you are surrounded by a variety of relatively easy to hack coloured servers, but stray further afield and things can get much tougher. Walk up to a server and right click to start hacking and a load of nasty minions will spill out of it and start attacking you. Complete the hack to earn XP and collect some lovely loot to aid your future Hacking attempts. The final goal of the game is to find and hack the biggest server of them all to release an imprisoned AI. You’ll need to level up your character considerably before you take it on though as it’s incredibly tough.

Since we covered it originally, they’ve implemented a quick but very useful tutorial section that helps to get the player started. There are also plenty of new weaponry (allowing for billions of weapon combinations), multiplayer, a hardcore (YOLO) made, better graphics, hundreds of other gameplay tweaks and the S.H.A.R.K. (a badass boss character that’s very hard to kill).

Black Ice is a thoroughly enjoyable FPS roguelike, with a great art style and an addictive quality that pushes you to just do ‘one more hack’. Highly Recommended.

Play the Beta, Free

20,000 Leagues above the Clouds is a beautiful new Studio Ghibli inspired game that sees you captaining a steampunk airship across the seven skies. It features Diablo-esque point and click controls and Sid Meyers Pirates!-style battles between ships, all set in a beautiful enviroment, reminiscent of the floating islands of Avatar.

As you play the game you’ll upgrade your ship and equipment, allowing you to travel deeper into the seven skies. Your actions throughout the game will define your characters personality, allowing you to rule the skies through fear, or by turning on the charm.

The visually stunning world of 20,000 Leagues above the Clouds is inspired by Studio Ghibli (My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away), with an aim to create an adventure game in a similar style where you are the main character. It certainly looks like the devs are achieving this aim, with both the piratey gameplay and the steampunk sky-world looking wonderful.

At 20,000 leagues above the Clouds the view is stunning, we feel sorry for anyone who has to walk the plank!

Sign up for the Beta here

Goofball Goals may not match the mighty FIFA for graphical fidelity or technical prowess, but as far as fun goes, it kicks it out the park. Everything about the game is so wrong that it’s so right, with players controlling like a herd of drunken ballerina sumo wrestlers, it’s probably the worst soccer game you’ll ever play, but ALSO the best. It’s just so much fun watching your players amble around the field, falling over each other, smashing scenery, trying to kick the ball and falling on their asses.

The combination of awkwardly animated ragdoll players and realistic physics is perfect, allowing for some truly hilarious moments. There are also mini-games and a Level editor which is great fun to play around with. You owe it to yourself to try Goofball Goals, it’s the best worst soccer game ever made.

Download Goofball Goals, Free

Age of Ascent (AoA) is a great looking new space-based sandbox MMO, that is so big, that they’re planning on breaking EVE Online’s Guinness World Record (4070 concurrent pilots fighting) by staging the largest PvP battle ever seen.

As if that wasn’t enough, they’re planning to beat EVE Online’s record with the battle taking place in a single, continuous unsharded battlezone, all in real time (EVE uses time dilation). If Age of Ascent manages to pull it off, this will be the MMO equivalent of beating an opponent blindfolded, with your arms tied behind your back, while balancing a tea-cup on your head.

The Alpha test will be for the PvP component only, but the devs promise that the full game will include exploration (in a map of our real galaxy), a completely player-driven economy, PvE missions, modular ship designs, space station construction and management, and all the alliance organisational tools you’ll need.

To top thing off, although the game looks pretty spectacular, it will play on any browser (Other than Safari), and doesn’t require the installation of any game data or plug-ins. All you have to do is turn up at the website on March the 14th, where you’ll be assigned a side, jump straight in and take part in a world record breaking battle!

Join in the Guinness World Record breaking Alpha

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