Steam Next Fest June 2026

Another three months have passed, another Next Fest comes up. We locked our interns in the Game Basement and made them play some demos, and now it’s time to tell you which ones you should check out, and which ones you should avoid.

Androfoco is a first person arena shooter. You play as a mannequin and shoot other mannequins. How you go about actually shooting things is a mystery. There’s a lock-on which you can use to, predictably, lock-on to your target, then you fire at them. The lock-on has a cooldown, for some reason, and locking on to enemies is the only way to hit them, since your shots are incredibly imprecise. You can shoot an ineffective projectile, but sometimes you shoot a series of ineffective lasers. Other times, you can’t shoot at all. It’s Benadryl-induced dissociative episode, but it makes less sense.

Everything in the game seems to be tied to some cooldown. Your shots charge up over time, so does your shield, lock on and “maneuver”, as indicated by the helpful icons on the upper left. Those are of a target, a disco ball and a deer. You know, the classic deer icon to represent your inherent deerness. I have no idea what these mean, and I don’t really want to find out. It’s like asking me to decode an encrypted message that starts with the phrase “let me tell you about my hemorrhoids”. I don’t want to know the rest.

As to how the game feels to play, it feels awful. The sensitivity is set so high I could do a 360 by twitching my index finger on the mouse. The need to lock on to anything to hit means you can only attack every few seconds. When you’re waiting for your cooldowns, you’ll just be wandering the arena like a kid lost in a supermarket. On the rare occasion when you manage to hit something, you won’t know you did. Nothing in this game feels like it has any connection to your inputs. You press a button and something happens, other times you press the same button and something else happens, and a lot of the time, nothing happens.

If you have eyes to see, you’ll notice the game looks like a low quality nightmare. Every character is a grey, untextured mannequin ripped straight from some asset database, with the tags still on. The arenas look like someone’s first Blender project, before they’ve even done the Blenderguru donut, and the sounds remind me of the time I had to take a Calculus midterm while suffering from a migrane.

In short, I don’t recommend Androfoco to anyone, except maybe if Hitler gets revived using black magic. He should play this for a few hours.

Anomaly President is a side-scrolling beat-em-up management game. You go into stages, beat the absolute tar out of dozens of enemies, and collect resources, which you bring back to your campaign van, use them to build rooms and upgrade your gear, so you can go back and do violence for more resources. It’s an interesting gameplay loop with some neat ideas.

In the combat portion, you’ll be running across a stage, doing light platforming and killing any enemy that tries to hinder your presidential campaign. There’s a sword attack which does damage in a large area, and a punch which deals posture damage. If an enemy takes enough posture damage, they can be executed. You can deal posture damage by parrying, too, because Sekiro was the most influential game in the past decade.

Along with the two attack types, there are special anomaly attacks. These are specialty skills that cost mana, which you regenerate by attacking, and are also limited by a cooldown. These usually hit in an area, and deal a lot of damage. There’s one that turns you into a big sumo guy to slam the ground and send your enemies flying for a bit. You can’t combo them in the air afterwards, which is a bit of a missed opportunity.

Seeing as how this game throws every design trend of the past few years in a blender, there’s also roguelite elements. Every now and then you find a fluffy which asks you to pick one of three. With these choices you can modify your various attacks. You can have a support character come out and breathe fire whenever you use an anomaly attack, add ice to your sword attacks so you can freeze enemies, or make it so your parries electrify anyone that tries to hit you. These are kind of interesting. They make your numbers bigger.

The combat itself is solid, if a bit easy. Your attacks have a lot of range, meaning you can attack large groups of enemies easily. Hit stun is generous, letting you lock a group of enemies down with a quick strike. You can dodge out of the way of attacks by moving, which is always nice, but if you need to reposition there’s also an invincible dodge roll. The parry is powerful, but the rest of your tools are useful, so you won’t be sitting around fishing for parries. It works well and feels good, but the enemies are complete pushovers.

Not even strength in numbers could save these hapless mooks from getting mowed down by your mighty sword. You can cut through them like how I cut through all the shrimp wontons at my local Chinese buffet, right before getting kicked out. It doesn’t get to the level of something like Dynasty Warriors, but you’re not fighting real threats. You’re smacking training dummies. They can do damage to you, but only because they attack in packs, and the stages are long, so there are hundreds of chances for you to screw up and take a bite of damage.

There’s a mole enemy that really served to highlight how pathetic all the opposition in this game is. The mole guys are reluctant security guards that clearly don’t want to fight you. When you stagger them, they fall on the ground crying, and when you execute them you violently stab them in the head. It’s excessively mean. That can be applied to the rest of the enemies, too. They don’t make me feel bad for them, but I felt like I was fighting a kid in a wheelchair most of the time.

Once you finish genociding innocent mole guards, you can go back to your tour bus and upgrade it. Stack rooms on it, assign fluffies to work in them, upgrade your equipment, and do more things. If you fail a level, you can come back to the bus with your new materials, make yourself stronger, and try again. You can also go to other areas on the world map and participate in other activities, like dancing, to win votes and get resources.

The game’s visual presentation is a mix of pixel art with heavy digital effects piled on top. Lots of digital lights, depth of field, that sort of thing. There are a lot of particle effects and glows that aren’t done in the pixel style, and that always clashes a little. The overworld map is done in a more traditional illustrated digital style, which is also a little disjointed. The UI elements are all very clean and minimalist, again conflicting with the other aspects. I think it looks okay, but there’s too much digital shine on top of the art.

I recommend you check out Anomaly President. It’s a bit easy and repetitive, but decently fun for a while. The base building/beat em up combat loop is interesting, and it will give you an incentive to explore and keep going for more upgrades. You don’t need them, since the enemies are a bit too easy. You can already go through them like a hot knife through butter, I don’t really see the need to upgrade the knife to make it even hotter. Still, give it a shot. There’s an audience for this out there, and I thought it was a good time.

Towership Defender is a single-tower tower defense game with a ship that’s also a tower. The ship, which is also a tower, will defend an area, by itself, since it’s a single tower, but also a ship. I’ll stop this dumb bit now. It’s an incremental clicker idle game where you watch a ship spin around and shoot down little alien things.

As the ship shoots, you get fragments. You use these fragments to buy upgrades, which are numerical. You buy the damage increase, you do one more damage per attack. You buy the speed upgrade, you shoot 1% faster. There aren’t any cool tower upgrades or anything, just slowly watching the fragments go up so you can buy an upgrade that makes another number go up. Little by little. Forever.

There really isn’t much to this game. I’m not a fan of idle/clicker games at all. This might appeal to someone other than me. My experience with this game was that it was incredibly boring. I love tower defense games, and this one reeled me in just to see what the heck a single-tower game meant. I imagined it wouldn’t be much fun, with the fact that you don’t have to strategically place different towers to synergize and take down different threats, and I was right. This wasn’t any fun. I just sat there and watched the ship shoot the same three enemy types for a few minutes.

I didn’t like Towership Defender, but if for some reason you like this kind of thing, I suggest you find a new hobby. Take up something more productive, like watching paint dry or counting the leaves on a tree.

Ego is a huge waste of time. Billing itself as a 3D smoke-based beat-’em-up, it’s actually a surrealist platformer that makes zero sense, and controls about as well as a truck on ice. You play as a smoke wizard, who’s only half as high as whoever thought this game was a good idea.

The tutorial shows you some symbols with a short gameplay video of what the button is supposed to do. What does it all mean? Who knows. You press the A button, or the button that’s at the bottom of the controller, and smoke guy jumps, but watch out! You shouldn’t use it when the smoke meter is red. Why? What do I look like? The Ego expert? Go figure it out for yourself, idiot.

The first stage of this smoke-based beat-’em-up features exactly zero enemies. You move forward in an abstract mess of structures and try to find your way to the exit. Where is it? You keep asking me questions, and I don’t have the answers. I know I’m the one that’s supposed to be reviewing this thing, but I have no idea. Eventually, I had a divine vision of where the exit was, and reached it. I had zero fun.

Upon finishing the level, the game gave me a D grade. D for Dumb. I got on my knees and begged the game to forgive me for my transgressions, and retried the stage, to see if I could become less dumb. I found the path to the exit, which was a straight shot flying through an unmarked trail and up to the exit, with no rhyme or reason. There might be a better way to do this, but I can’t be arsed to find it. I reached the exit and got a B for my effort. I had done it. I had become marginally less stupid.

I decided to try again. Maybe if I really put some effort into it, I might uncover this game’s hidden genius. After all, IGN gave God Hand a 3/10. Maybe this was my God Hand. I tried the level again, stumbled a little because there’s zero sign posting and the level makes about as much sense as the phrase “disco melatonin guava apostrophe”, so I restarted the level and tried again. Once I did, I finished the level pretty fast, and the game awarded me a D again.

Why? Well, this time I know the answer. It’s because apparently, it took me a full minute to clear the level. The thing I did in around 12 seconds, the game says I did in one minute. The game’s timer counts when you start the stage, and doesn’t reset when you restart the level.

At this point, I felt comfortable in my assessment that this game is a complete piece of garbage. The controls are sluggish and weird, the game doesn’t explain anything, the levels were designed by throwing random assets into a void, and the sound design with the constant huffing and puffing makes me feel like I’m standing next to an overweight guy who just sprinted into the elevator with me, and he keeps breathing into my face, trying not to have a heart attack.

Don’t play Ego. Not even as a joke.

Noooo! You didn’t even play the whole demo! How can you judge the game before seeing the combat and all it has offer?

I did. Gotta have a game worth playing for more than ten minutes.

Poly Fighter is a single-player roguelike fighting game. I was going to talk about it, but look at the video above. We got throw loops. That’s the game.

Even if you play the game “as it’s intended”, all you have to do is block until your opponent uses their unsafe move, then do light>medium>heavy>special and that’s it. Rinse and repeat. This is terrible.

If you want a single-player fighting game that will teach you the basics, play Footsies: Rollback Edition, instead. It’s a much better game.

Poly Fighter? Not recommended. Skip it.

From here on out I’m going to vent about fighting games, so if you just wanted to know my thoughts on Poly Fighter, you can skip ahead to the next game.

This is the result of fighting games becoming mainstream. Every Tom, Dick and Henry thinks they can make their own fighting game, just because they can mash a few buttons in Strive or SF6. They don’t understand the fundamentals, or any specific quirks. For example, no indie fighter, or modern fighter in general, has jabs that whiff on crouch. There aren’t anymore invincible DPs, everything is tied to meter. It’s about doing the epic combos but they don’t focus on the neutral or anything like that. You can have all that, but when every game is a beginner-friendly combo exhibition made to look fun, it all blends together into a grey mess.

Kingdom Rush 6 is a Tower Defense game. Enemies come in through pre-determined paths, and you have to put down towers to defeat them before they reach the end. There are a lot of different towers, with unique uses, and enemies that have to be taken down with specific tactics. Each tower can be upgraded in each level, and there are also persistent upgrades that give you permanent upgrades. It’s a pretty standard, but solid and enjoyable tower defense.

As you can tell by the 6 in the name, this is the sixth installment in the Kingdom Rush series. It started out back in 2011 as a free game on Armor Games. I say this because the game still feels like a flash game from 2011. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The original still holds up. Don’t fix what ain’t broken, but other than the bigger screen size and shinier art, it doesn’t do much new. It even has a lot of the same voice clips.

The game itself is still good. The towers are well designed, with their own use cases. There’s a good variety to them, letting you make interesting formations. The enemies are combined in ways that make you think ahead and prepare, instead of just plopping down the same tower over and over and calling it a day. It’s got all you could ask from a tower defense game.

The game does have a few things that bother me. The enemies are extremely tanky. They take forever to kill, and it makes levels drag a bit longer than they should. It also makes your towers feel weak. This could be made a little better with a speed up option, to make the game go faster, but there isn’t one, and I think there should be. There are points in these kinds of games where you pretty much solve the level, and you don’t have to do much other than watch each wave go by. A speed up option would be welcome.

There’s also the persistent upgrade system. Towers, heroes and spells can be upgraded and made stronger, which means you can’t do a perfect clear of a level on the first try without the upgrades. You’re expected to level things up by replaying levels. That might get old quick. It’s not necessary, but if you want to beat a level with more than two or three lives left, you’ll have to upgrade. The upgrades themselves are underwhelming. A few numbers here and there. 5% more damage, that sort of thing.

You can look past a lot of these, and there’s a solid game underneath. I recommend checking it out if you’re interested. You can also try the first Kingdom Rush, for free, and see if you’d like this sort of thing.

Check out Kingdom Rush 6 here.

Side note: I’m still surprised that the best version of Kingdom Rush, with all the quality of life features, has already been done… by Nikke. Goddess of Victory Nikke, the phone game. Yeah, the gooner game where anime girls twerk while they shoot. That one. They had an event where they had a tower defense mini game, and it was a copy/homage of Kingdom Rush, but they did a great job at replicating it, and adding their own cool, new twists. It even has a speed-up option.

DASH n CRY is a precision platformer. It’s legally distinct Celeste. Play as a little girl with pink hair, run, jump and dash through sadistic levels to reach the exit and collect strawberries- I mean- paint stars. It’s one of those games where you’re supposed to nail a pixel-perfect jump, but if you miss, you just get sent back a few steps and try again. A save-state platformer.

Looking at it on its own, it’s a competent game. The platforming is challenging, the controls are tight, and there are some interesting obstacles. The game ramps up its difficulty a lot faster than Celeste does, too. There are some basic obstacles, like moving hazards, and some crumbling platforms, but they’re arranged in clever ways to keep you guessing.

To move around you have a double jump and an air dash. You can jump, dash, jump again then dash before hitting the ground, and the game takes full advantage of this, making the platforming more about staying in the air. The dash has a good sense of speed to it, and the jump arcs are nice and precise. After a few minutes, you’ll be chaining air dashes like one of them anime characters.

I can’t help but make comparisons to Celeste, since this is pretty much just that, but when you’re copying the smart kid’s homework, you’re sure to get an A, too. It has its own ideas and obstacles, like the different moving platforms and the underwater bits, which help it along. They didn’t just take Celeste and change a few words around. They added a few synonyms.

DASH n Cry gets a recommendation. If you loved Celeste and you’re still itching for some pixel-precise platforming punishment, give it a shot. If the idea of slamming your head against the same jump for five minutes straight doesn’t seem like a good time, then give this a skip.

There’s no wavedashing here, which is a missed opportunity. Minus points for that. Wait, I’m not keeping score, am I?

Project Turbo Blast is a high-speed racing game. You race around a futuristic race track going at ludicrous speeds, chaining boosts and drifting across massive turns. It’s heavily inspired by F-Zero GX, and it’s a high-intensity blast of arcade goodness.

It’s easy to pick up and play. Cars grip the track like their lives depend on it, over/under steer is a suggestion, and you don’t really have to let off the accelerator at any point. It’s a full-on arcade racer. It’s more focused around navigating the massive, sweeping turns, chaining as many boosts as possible, going so fast your head slams against the seat like you’re in one of those tilt-a-whirl things at the fair.

The controls are fantastic. The cars handle with unnatural precision, letting you thread the needle through the turns, even at 600 miles an hour. You can make micro-adjustments on the fly, or keep a smooth line going. It’s responsive and quick, like an arcade racer should be.

The game’s drift system locks you into a sideways slide when you press the button. As you drift, you build drift boost. Press the turbo button when the bar’s full, and you get a speed boost in the middle of your drift. Adjust the angle, and keep surfing the turns while racking up as many bursts of speed as possible.

If that’s not enough boost for you, there’s also a super turbo. When the gauge fills, you can activate it for a long-lasting kick of speed. This ramps you up to exhilarating speeds that go beyond mortal comprehension. It’s so much that, at times, it’s even kind of disorienting. Once you get the hang of it, and know the courses, you’ll be able to use this to sail past everyone else.

The game has a fun, colorful cel-shaded art style. It goes for a Y2K throwback, that’s really trendy at the time, with its blocky font and thick outlines that look like they’re straight from the year 2002. The cars look nice and appealing, with a stylized cartoonish design that makes them look like little toy cars. Along with that, it has a great drum and bass soundtrack to pump you up.

The game has a great sense of speed thanks to some neat visual tricks. The road’s surface is gritty and detailed, making it look like it’s speeding by underneath. There are subtle speed lines going across the screen and the car, making it look like it’s about to break the sound barrier. The UI is full of life, too. It jostles and vibrates as if it’s the instrument cluster in the car, and it can barely stay put together due to all the speed. Whenever you turn, the UI shifts to the same side, giving everything a good sense of movement.

It’s a very well put together package, with some great gameplay and presentation. It’s simple to pick up and play. In a few minutes you’ll be going so fast your eyebrows will be on the back of your head. Then it’s a matter of mastering each track, and keeping the boosts going. It offers a sense of speed you can’t get anywhere else. Except maybe if you see me running back to that Chinese buffet I mentioned (after I was thrown out once).

I recommend Project Turboblast. If you like fun, give it a shot.

Truck-kun is an arcade driving game. You drive around a town, completing objectives to extend your time, so you can keep completing more objectives. These objectives are variations on driving stunts, like drifting, driving in reverse, jumping or driving in one direction. A lot of the time they’re also about crashing into objects and running over pedestrians. It’s okay, it’s not murder, according to the anime girl in your head. You’re helping them get isekai’d.

The game has a solid core loop, with some unfortunate missteps. Your main goal is to level up the aforementioned anime girl, so she can gain experience, level up, defeat the demon lord and come back to Earth. You do this by running over pedestrians to supply her with enemies to fight, and running over objects to give her attack power to fight said enemies. This makes you drive around, looking for people and objects to hit in a balance so she can farm them. Spend too much time hitting pedestrians, she has enemies but no attack. Hit too many objects, and she can hit hard, but she isn’t hitting anything. That part is okay.

The rest of the core gameplay is also fun. It has that addictive time extending thing that Crazy Taxi does, where you’re racing against the clock to get more things done. It puts you in a frantic state of mind, looking around the map for the best way to complete your objectives, while balancing the weird xp mechanic. There are also packages to deliver. Do all these tasks to earn stars. You need to accumulate a certain number of them across runs to get to the next milestone.

The game does a lot of cool things, but it has some missteps, like I said. The controls aren’t the best. The truck handles poorly, but not heavy like a truck. It’s strangely unresponsive, it has some inertia to turn that feels weird. Its brakes are terrible, too. You can do a 180 turn with the push of a button, but there are times where you need to stop, and the brakes feel like they engage half a second after you slam them.

In fact, the whole game feels weirdly sluggish. It’s like I’m playing it on Stadia with 200 ping. It slows down at random, slows down when you activate the attack for the anime girl’s isekai thing, it slows down when you hit certain things. It doesn’t do it in a cool slow-mo way, either. It’s chugging.

The worst of it happens with the cops. When you do your objectives, you generate heat, and that makes cops spawn in and chase you. These guys are relentless. They’ll materialize in front of you out of thin air, and slam into you repeatedly, jamming you into walls, killing your momentum, and getting you stuck on tiny bits of geometry. The only way to get them off you is to give them a long speech on how you’re a sovereign citizen. Not really, you slam them back, but you might as well go the long-winded speech route since the game slows down to 1 frame per day when you hit them. It’s like it can’t handle your anti-establishment rebellion and it’s slowing down to cheer you on.

I don’t know if I recommend Truck-kun. It’s fun, and it has some great ideas, but the controls and performance are both a noticeable obstacle. The cops are way too relentless and annoying, too. Literal fun police. They’re not fun enemies to overcome, they’re an active hindrance; a detriment to the enjoyment of the game. If you think you can overlook these flaws, give the game a shot. I know I had fun with it for a few minutes.

Hyperfist (no need to yell) is a first-person brawler. Play as a guy with mechanical arms, and punch bots.

There’s different punch attacks. A regular punch, which hits things. A charge punch, which sends you forward, an uppercut which sends enemies flying and a ground slam. They don’t really combine or flow into each other.

The enemies sort of waddle at you, posing no real threat. There are some tanky big guys with guns. They take a lot of hits to kill, and they’re constantly shooting their guns, but they don’t do much. You can heal easily, so nothing has any real consequence.

The game has a very buys, overly saturated hypergraphic art style that kind of looks okay, but starts to wear on the eyes after a bit. It’s very art-college core. The music is a repetitive, droning 4 second loop.

I don’t recommend Hyperfist. Not much to it.

Why do I bring it up? Because while playing, I had a strange sense of Deja-vu. I was playing as a guy with a mechanical arm, dashing around, sending people flying. Wait a minute, this is Doomfist! I’m playing as Doomfist! How exciting! Except it wasn’t They made a game where you play as Doomfist, and it’s boring. That’s an achievement.

Knuckle Jet is a 2D platformer. You play as Anastasia, director of an orphanage and also a high-flying daredevil with a rocket fist. Two games in a row about rocket fists, and this one’s also a precision platformer like the legally-distinct Celeste back there. There’s also some Rocket Knight Adventure thrown in, for good measure. Use your rocket fist to fly around levels to save the orphans.

The Knuckle Jet lets you fly around. Hold the button down and you zip around with full 360 degree freedom, punching anything in your way. Until it overheats, that is. Managing the gauntlet’s heat is key to staying alive. If it happens while you’re in mid-air, you drop into whatever hungry meat grinder is waiting for you below. Managing the heat is intuitive, and a cool challenge. It makes you think about your actions, and how they’ll affect your resource.

Along with the rocket fist, you have a dash and a nitro boost. The dash is a quick step in one direction that cancels out your momentum. It’s useful for switching directions abruptly in mid-air. It doesn’t raise your heat bar, so you can use it to get a little extra distance while conserving your main fist. The nitro boost is a powered-up rocket fist that uses fuel instead of heat. Refill it by rocketing into enemies and other breakables.

These three parts of the movement system come together like a well-oiled machine. You’ll be dashing around, switching between each as the situation calls for it. Fly with the rocket fist for a while, dash out of it for extra height, float back down with the nitro boost and back to the rocket to conserve fuel. Juggling these three can be done with a quick button press, making split-second decision making a breeze, even when you have to switch multiple times in a few short moments.

The levels make good use of the movement. They’re short, meant to be cleared quickly, chasing a gold medal. They have lots of lines and opportunities for you to rocket around, with enemies and obstacles placed in devious locations to keep you alert. The stages are a joy to play, and offer a decent challenge. You can try to go for a gold medal clear time for an even tougher challenge, or take on the optional star missions that are basically Super Meat Boy levels. These get really sadistic, forcing you to take tight, precise paths that push your resource management to the limit. Overall, the levels are great.

The game has a cute hand-made look to it. It’s meant to look like a stop motion cartoon, with the characters made of clay and their clothes made of real fabrics. It reminds me of Kirby’s Epic Yarn or Yoshi’s Wooly World a bit. It has that crafted look to it, but with a dingier, more industrial look to it, which works well.

I recommend Knuckle Jet. It’s a well designed platformer that offers a decent challenge, designed around a cool, smooth flight mechanic.

Takeover 2 is a beat-’em-up. I’m always looking for a good beat-’em-up in these Next Fests, and I can’t find any. I’m like the guy who gets to the Chinese Buffet after me, and he’s looking for lo mein, but there is none, for I have eaten all of it, and got kicked out for it. Now, with Takeover 2, I’ve finally found my lo mein.

In Takeover 2 you go through a dingy city beating the soul out of random thugs. It’s a standard beat-’em-up, but I’m so glad it is. I want standard. It’s not perfect, but it’s playable.

You have your standard punch combo, which ends in a knockdown. There’s a heavy kick combo, which also ends in a knockdown, aerial attacks; one that staggers and one that knocks down, two running attacks, a special move and a gun. Yeah, like it’s The Punisher or something. You have a gun you can shoot, with limited ammo. The offensive arsenal is dependable. It works as it should, most of the time, and it’ll do the job of punching the crime right out of some punk’s skull, along with 30% of his brain. Seriously, the blood effects in this game are extreme. It reminds me of The Scout from TF2 screaming “He punched out all my blood!”

There are some defensive options, too. You can dodge roll up and down, and there’s a parry, because parries are government mandated now, apparently. Can’t have a combat system without one. These defensive combat options are not my favorite. They’re there, but they don’t have to be. You can walk around the enemies, which is good, but the parry has some implications, mainly the fact that all the enemies now attack a lot slower, because everything has to be reactable.

The game also has an emphasis on combos, to its detriment. The combos aren’t anything too impressive. This isn’t Denjin Makai 2. You won’t have to know what attacks combo into what, or how they launch enemies, or how to pick them up after being launched. You do your regular punch combo, the enemy flies off, bounces off a wall, and you do the combo again. There aren’t any fancy moves to play around with.

This has the unwanted consequence of making every enemy really tanky. Can’t have a combo system if enemies die in a few hits, so the value of their Hit Points is inflated, much like the current value of the US Dollar. This means regular bad guys take a long while to kill, making you feel weak and the stages drag on like one of my run-on sentences.

If I have this much negativity to spout about the game, how could I say it’s good? Well, I get really nitpicky like this because I like the game. I think it’s a solid beat-’em-up. The enemies are well designed; they have their roles, their unique attacks, and they attack from different sides. They actively hunt the player down, surround them and act like real jerks, the way it should be. The combat, while sort of sluggish thanks to those tanky enemies, is still responsive, meaty and satisfying. You can do all the fun things that come with this genre, like crowd control and moving around an enemy’s attack. It’s got the neutral.

It’s a pretty solid core, with some unnecessary trimmings on top. There are also some other complaints, but those are for big nerds like me. For example, the grab doesn’t have i-frames. That’s a big no-no. Sure, your dodge has a ton of i-frames, and you have a parry, but i-frames on a grab is pretty fundamental. It’s a way to create breathing room in some tough situations. The rest of the grab works fine. You toss an enemy and that thing becomes a bowling ball, and everyone else on screen is a hapless pin. It feels good to play, but it has its stinky side.

Overall I recommend Takedown 2. It’s a tough, old-school feeling game with some weird new-school stuff stapled on top. It’s like an old man saying Six-seven to seem hip and cool. Even then, give it a look if you like beat-’em-ups.

Those are all the demos the interns- I mean- I was able to play on Monday and Tuesday. There were a lot more I still have to check out, and a lot more that were probably terrible. If I find anything else worth looking at, I might edit this article and add it, or make a part 2. Probably not.

I spent most of my time sifting through AI garbage. I hate it here.