Alpha Beta Gamer

Drift Stage is an über-cool retro racer, with awesome retro neon visuals and gameplay that harkens back to the glorious arcade racers of the 80’s and 90’s.

Inspired by classics such as Ridge Racer and Outrun, Drift Stage is a modern evolution of the classic arcade racer, with vibrant visuals, a rocking soundtrack and drift based arcade racing that will make you grin from ear to ear. This early alpha demo contains a time trial event for you to challenge three target time ghosts (novice/intermediate/expert), but the final version will feature a variety of retro cars and tracks, career mode, circuit races and multiplayer (local & Online).

It’s a wonderful love letter to the classic arcade racer, with striking visuals and handling that will make you laugh with glee as you perform epic drifts around corners. Retro racing doesn’t get any cooler than this.

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

Insatia is a wonderfully addictive game that takes the best bits of Snake and Tron-lightcycles and mixes them up into a rather grotesque worm-on-worm combat game.

The rules are fairly simple, your worm can swallow anything that fits in its mouth, including parts of other worms. The more you eat, the more you grow, until you are able to consume everything in your path. You will lose maneuverability though, so don’t get too greedy! Try to take one bite too many, and you might just end up losing your tail.

The controls feel perfect for a worm simulator, with you having to waggle left and right (either with keys or mouse) to move forward, and you also able to hold back to charge up an attack. Not only does Insatia offer brutal worm-on-worm combat, it also shakes things up a bit, offering up different gameplay modes, such as races or playing as one of the little bugs that the worms prey on.

Currently in the Alpha stages of development, Insatia is already a blast to play, with an excellent soundtrack, suitably gory creepy crawly visuals and highly addictive one-more-go gameplay. Wonderful wormy fun.

Play the Insatia Alpha, Free

Facewound is a fun, brutal and bloody 2D run and gun side scroller, with an impressive particle physics engine, ragdoll effects, a vast array of weaponry and huge hordes of monsters to use them on.

The original aim for the devs was to make a 2D shooter with all of the effects of something like Counter-Strike: Source. They’ve certainly achieved that and a whole lot more, with impressive visual effects, massive explosions, a very cool slow-mo ability, and a large assortment of weaponry to blow away hordes of zombies, spacebrains, ghosts, skeletons, rocks, fish and more. Taking down swarms of these monsters is superb fun, whether popping heads with a magnum, decimating groups with a shotgun, nuking them with explosives or just charging at them with a chainsaw - in Facewound killing things just looks so cool, particularly in slow-mo.

The extensive armoury is unlocked through a shop (accessed by pressing ‘B’), where you can use your hard earned plutonium to purchase bow & arrows, grenades, sawn off shotguns, chainsaws, landmines, AK-47s, Miniguns, Flamethrowers and more. It’s best upgrading your weapon as soon as possible as the basic handgun is fairly weak and the rest of the weaponry is so much fun (Hint: Jump into the wall on your left when you start the game and you’ll find a secret area full of plutonium that you can use to upgrade your weaponry).

There may be all manner of monsters out to get you in Facewound, but by far the most deadly thing in the game is the humble oil barrel. God knows what’s in them, but Facewound has by far the most devastatingly explosive oil barrels ever witnessed in a game - causing massive explosions that shake the screen and decimate anything nearby, including you. A general rule of thumb for these drums is: if you can see it when it explodes you will die. So if you see one on fire, RUN!

Running and gunning in Facewound is incredible fun, blowing away hordes of monsters with overpowered weaponry in slow motion never gets old. It’s also peppered with nice little touches like humorous billboards and secret areas. It really is a blast (especially if you stand too close to those oil barrels).

Download the Beta, Free

Guild of Dungeoneering is a papercraft dungeon exploration game where you don’t get to control your adventurer directly. Instead you lay out the dungeon one room at a time, placing treasure and monsters to trying to carefully guide your dungeoneer to victory.

Each turn you’re given a choice of 5 cards to lay or discard, allowing you to lay map tiles, enemies or loot. The loot can be treasure, equipment or weapons that will aid your progress. You can’t constantly just lay treasure cards though, thanks to a points system that means you have to defeat enemies before you can lay the loot cards.

Fights against enemies are entirely stat based, so it’s best to obtain some better equipment before taking on the tougher baddies. It can be a little infuriating that the dungeoneer has a mind of his own, as he can be suicidal at times, but it’s a good feature and adds a some welcome randomness to the proceedings.

The Alpha Demo is still early in development, so it’s not fully featured, but it does a good job of showing off the unique gameplay and the fun papercraft visual style which adds a lot of warmth and charm to the game. An interesting idea, well implemented, watch out for those rubber duckies!

Play the Alpha, Free

Storium is an online storytelling game that allows players to create a story through a series of scenes, reacting to obstacles and people as you come across them. It’s played with 3 people, with one person playing as the Narrator, and the other 2 playing as the characters.

The Narrator chooses the world that the story is set in (with choices such as ‘occult pop horror’, ‘medical drama’ and ‘cyberpunk’), then starts each scene, using cards to give the players challenges to overcome. The players will then try to overcome these challenges as they see fit, progressing the story in fun and interesting ways.

There are a few more rules, but it’s remarkably easy to pick up and is only limited by your imagination. Storium is a fun and fluid way of storytelling, with players reacting to each other and no-one being fully in control, it can lead to some VERY interesting stories.

Our attempt was an occult pop horror called ‘The Badgers of Doom’, they’re black, they’re white, and they bite! Coming soon to cinemas near you!

Sign up for the Alpha

UPDATE: Alpha Sign-ups are now closed, but you can now get immediate access to the Beta by backing the Storium Kickstarter

Mini Metro is a simple, fun and addictive subway planning game, where you’re tasked with drawing routes between stations to minimise commuter congestion. Things start of easily with only 3 stations, but as time progresses more stations are added, increasing the burden on your network. You will unlock upgrades as time progresses, but eventually, due to congestion, your network will grind to a halt, all you can do it try and prevent this for as long as possible.

Mini Metro is a simple, easy to learn, addictive game, that actually manages to turn the art of subway planning into a highly enjoyable pastime!

Download or Play the Alpha free in a Unity Supported browser (Win, Linux, Mac)

Gunscape is a great new voxel based FPS construction kit that allows you to create your own single-player campaigns, co-op levels or multi-player arenas, tailoring the theme, weapons, enemies and power-ups to create your unique vision.

The crafting is remarkably easy once you get the hang of it, with the basic level layout created out of Minecraft-style cubes, then filled with a wide selection of decorations and interactive objects. There will be a large choice of themes, ranging from early classics to the modern triple-A stealth and war shooters. Levels can then be uploaded, shared and voted on, so there will allways be a huge selection of content to play.

There were no single-player levels available at time of testing, but Multi-player death-matches are reminiscent of early shooters like Quake and Doom, fast paced and fun, with a nice selection of weaponry, power-ups and enemies to keep things interesting. Gunscape is shaping up to be a very powerful FPS Construction-kit, with which it’s both fun to create and fun to play.

Download the Alpha, Free

Classroom Aquatic is a ridiculous game where you take on the roll of a foreign exchange student in a school of dolphins.

Unfortunately for you, your class is doing a test, which you’re you’ve got no chance of passing unaided as you don’t know any of the answers. This means if you you’re going to pass the test you’re going to have to use stealth and sneaky distractions to sneak a peak at the other students answers. You’ll have to be careful though, as you really don’t want to get caught. Getting told off in first person, by your dolphin teacher is a strange and rather terrifying experience!

Classroom aquatic is a great game that takes a simple, unique idea and runs (or swims if you prefer) with it. It’s a wonderfully fresh take on the stealth genre. You’ll never look at dolphins in the same way after you’ve been told off by one.

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

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