Alpha Beta Gamer

The Crack is a great looking fusion of Tower defense and FPS, set in a dark dystopian future where aliens have invaded planet earth. You’re job is to defend against waves of attacking aliens using classical tower defense tactics, but with the ability to switch to a first person view and control units such as mechs, soldiers, assault planes and more.

Still in early development, the game already looks fantastic, both in tower defence commander view and first person view. Each level will have it’s own distinctive atmosphere, complete with destructable terrain and you’ll be able to play a single player campaign, multiplayer versus and co-op. The Crack has already been greenlit on Steam and will feature full Steam support and global leaderboards.

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Tricone Lab is a fun puzzle game where each level is a microscopic multicellular organism. You must utilise the different resources within the cell to create a substance called Tricone. This starts off very easily, but soon gets tougher as more catalysts and molecules get introduced, creating complex logic puzzles that require some experimentation.

The graphical style is pleasingly simple, with each multicellular organism reacting to your actions, and a fun, organic way of combining resources. Tricone Lab has a pick up and play quality that makes it great for short bursts of puzzle gaming – a fun organic puzzler that rewards lateral thinking.

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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!

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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

Orbital Gear is a great looking multiplayer 2D shooter where you can jump between small Mario Galaxy style planetoids, utilizing their gravity to give your mech momentum through space.

The final version will have four different mechs and and twelve different weapons to take into battle, with the various game modes including ‘Orbital Warfare’ – a siege mode where the goal is to destroy the opponents base.

It’s a nice looking game, with fast paced multiplayer gameplay, interesting gravity based game mechanics and some very stylish visuals.

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Dwarf Tower is a great turn based tactics game where you build, defend and fortify your tower while using spells and weapons to bring down your opponents one. It’s got a simple, but stylish pixel art aesthetic that offers a pleasingly simple way of building your towers and allows you to focus on the rather addictive gameplay.

A successful tower will consist of 4 main things - crystals which generate mana, Dwarf dwellings which contain your workforce, libraries which contain your spells and the Archmage’s chamber which you must protect at all costs (lose it and it’s game over). There are plenty of other fortifications that you can install, but these are the main ones. Certain attacks can be targeted to devastating effect so it’s best to build your tower in such a way that the enemy can’t figure out where your vital buildings are (especially the Archmage’s chamber).

Each turn you’ll be given a random selection of tower pieces, spells and dwarf workforces to upgrade and attack with, rather like cards in a trading card game. It’s a great system, that mixes up the gameplay and forces you to build a different tower each time, as you build what you can with whatever resources are available.

The Beta currently supports single player and multiplayer and is already pretty addictive, especially against a human opponent, offering short bouts of tactical turn based fun.

Download the Beta, Free

Velvet Sundown is a very different type of role-playing game, a game where you actually take on the role of the character - a guest on a luxury yacht - with you and four other players building a 45 minute long story.

Each time you play Velvet Sundown you’ll be set up with a new identity for you to embody, interacting and chatting with other players, using charm and charisma to convince other players to follow your suggestions, allowing you to fulfil your objectives. Whether you’re a journalist, playboy, businessman or international spy, you each have your own objectives which can only be achieved with social interactions with other players.

Chatting is facilitated through a text-to-chat system, which means that everyone sounds a bit like Siri, but also means that there are no preformed conversation paths, you can say whatever you want to whoever you want. This allows for some wonderful free-form story-crafting, with love, scandal and espionage all commonplace on this luxury yacht. Much like our recently featured Storium, Velvet Sundown is a game that thrives on social interaction and creativity, as such, if you’re playing with the right people it’s a blast.

~~Sign-up for the Velvet Sundown Beta~~

UPDATE: Velvet Sundown is now in Open Beta On Steam, Board the Luxury Yacht for free

InVerbis Virtus is a first person spell casting game that mixes action and puzzle elements in a fantasy setting, you play as a wizard who can perform spells that will only be cast by pronouncing magic formulas. It’s like a better implemented and more complex version of the voice controls in Skyrim,

While playing InVerbis Virtus you find yourself completely unarmed in a dark dungeon that hides many dangers. The only way to overcome the obstacles is to learn the secrets of the arcane arts of magic through inscriptions that you will find along your path. The magic formulas found, if pronounced correctly, enable you to perform many kinds of spells. Using these powers in a creative way you can solve puzzles, overcome traps and kill the enemies that try to hinder your journey.

Even in Alpha, the voice controls work really well, allowing the user to comfortably cast spells and solve puzzles, all in a beautiful, highly artistic, gothic H.R. Gieger-esque setting.

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Red Goddess is a beautiful Metroidvania 2D action/adventure platformer that allows you to enter the minds of your enemies as you explore the subconscious of the main character. This gorgeous CGI rendered world represents the mind of your character, Divine, and all the enemies you meet are manifestations of her own bad thoughts. Her mind has become clouded and ill, a mysterious and unknown corruption is tearing her apart from the inside, so she sets out to investigate her own subconscious.

As well as jumping into the minds of her enemies, Divine can also split into two aspects of her personality - Rage and Fear - effectively giving you 3 different playable characters to switch between, each with their own skills and abilities. Also, when split into Rage and Fear the inactive half of your personality is represented by a glowing orb which can be thrown at enemies or teleported to, allowing you to access out of reach areas. Also, as with any Metroidvania game worth its salt, there’s plenty of other interesting powers to unlock as you progress.

Already Greenlit on Steam and a quarter of the way to it’s $50k Kickstarter goal, even in these early stages of development, Red Goddess looks fantastic. With it’s interesting storyline, beautiful visuals and fun gameplay mechanics, Red Goddess is shaping up to be an excellent platformer with some great ideas.

Download the Pre-Alpha, Free

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