Star Wars has covered almost every major video game genre, but turn-based tactics has remained one of the more obvious gaps. Star Wars Zero Company finally fills it, putting a small team of mercenaries in the middle of the Clone Wars and giving players control over their movement, abilities, equipment and relationships. Developed by Bit Reactor, a studio founded by veterans of the modern XCOM games, Zero Company clearly understands the tactical formula it is working with. It borrows familiar ideas without pretending that they are entirely new, then builds enough of its own systems around them to give the campaign a distinct identity.

Players take the role of Hawks, a former Republic officer who leads Zero Company, an unconventional group operating from the Den, a decommissioned cargo freighter permanently docked at the Ring of Kafrene. The company takes on contracts while becoming increasingly involved with the Infinite Coil, a Separatist-aligned paramilitary cult led by Kundri Fathom. Rather than building the campaign around established heroes from the films or animated series, Bit Reactor has created an original cast whose members come from very different backgrounds. That gives the story room to explore the Clone Wars from the perspective of people who are not necessarily fighting for the Republic out of duty or following the usual heroic path.

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No More Room in Hell 2 is a cooperative zombie survival shooter that puts more emphasis on staying alive than on killing everything in sight. Ammunition is limited, useful equipment has to be scavenged, objectives take time to complete and extraction is never guaranteed. It is a slower and more deliberate experience than most modern zombie shooters, with its best moments coming from the decisions a team makes when resources are running low and the safest option is not always obvious.

The 1.0 release gives the game a considerably stronger foundation. The finished package includes Objective and Survival modes, nine maps, 38 weapons, 10 zombie types, four difficulty levels, expanded progression, infection and extraction systems, a new tutorial and Solo Mode. It also represents a major technical improvement over the earlier version, with substantial work done on performance, visual effects, audio, loading and stability.

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Mortal Shell II is a striking example of a sequel understanding exactly what was worth keeping and what needed to change. The original Mortal Shell had an excellent central idea in its Shell system, but that idea was surrounded by a game that often felt smaller and less developed than its ambitions. Six years later, Cold Symmetry has taken that foundation and expanded it into a much more substantial action RPG, with faster combat, a larger interconnected world, deeper character development, more weapons and considerably more freedom in how you approach its challenges.

The result is not a perfect Soulslike, and the increased scope introduces some problems of its own. The open world can make navigation unnecessarily confusing, some progression mechanics take time to explain themselves, and the sheer number of systems occasionally makes the game feel less focused than its best individual parts suggest. There are also camera problems and some technical oddities that are particularly noticeable because precise timing is so important during combat. Even with those shortcomings, Mortal Shell II is a confident sequel that succeeds because it develops the series’ own ideas instead of simply trying to reproduce what other games in the genre have already done.

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The Sinking City 2 makes one of the more significant changes a sequel can make: it largely abandons the structure that defined its predecessor. The first game was an ambitious open-world detective adventure with horror elements, while its sequel is a much more traditional survival horror game built around exploration, combat, puzzles and resource management. That shift will not appeal to everyone, particularly players who came to the series for Frogwares’ investigative mechanics, but it gives the developer a much stronger foundation for its Lovecraftian setting. The result is a focused and atmospheric horror game that is considerably more successful at what it sets out to do than the original was at balancing its competing ideas.

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Madden NFL 27 is one of the more meaningful updates the series has received in recent years. Rather than concentrating on another collection of isolated features, EA has made changes that affect both sides of the experience: the football on the field and the way a season develops away from it. The result is a game that feels more responsive during individual plays while also giving Franchise players considerably more to manage.

The most noticeable gameplay changes involve physical receiver-defensive back battles, timing-based catching, short-yardage situations, defensive coverage and player AI. These systems do not completely rebuild Madden, but they make individual matchups more important and give players more control over how a play develops. The CPU also does a better job of making quarterbacks and other players behave according to their tendencies rather than treating every athlete as essentially the same.

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Hell Let Loose: Vietnam takes the large-scale multiplayer formula established by its World War II predecessor and applies it to a conflict that demands a different approach to movement, visibility and battlefield organisation. Developed by Expression Games and published by Team17, the standalone follow-up puts up to 100 players into battles between the US Armed Forces and North Vietnamese Army (NVA) across six maps, with helicopters, river combat, tunnel networks and a mixture of infantry, reconnaissance, armour, mortar and helicopter units. The fundamental structure remains familiar: teams fight over territory, squads coordinate through a command structure and individual kills matter considerably less than maintaining useful positions and keeping the wider attack or defence functioning.

That familiarity is both the game’s greatest strength and its most obvious limitation. Vietnam does not attempt to reinvent Hell Let Loose, and players expecting a faster or more accessible military shooter will find much of the same deliberate pace here. What the new setting does provide is a reason to alter how those established systems interact. Dense vegetation reduces visibility, rivers create alternative routes, helicopters change the importance of mobility, and NVA tunnel systems allow NVA forces to establish concealed positions and launch surprise attacks in ways that conventional military shooters rarely accommodate. The result is not a completely different game, but it is sufficiently different from the original to give the Vietnam setting its own identity.

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Big Walk is an unusual game to review because its most important mechanic is something that usually exists outside the game itself: talking to other people. House House, the Melbourne studio behind Untitled Goose Game, has built its latest release around the idea that exploring a world with friends can be an adventure in its own right. There are puzzles to solve, places to discover and an eventual ending to reach, but the way players communicate with one another is just as important as any conventional game mechanic.

The premise is straightforward. Between two and twelve players explore a large island together, solving environmental puzzles, finding useful objects and gradually making their way through a handcrafted cooperative adventure. There is no combat, traditional character progression or conventional quest log directing everyone toward the next objective. Instead, the game gives players a world to investigate and enough tools to interact with it, then leaves much of the problem-solving to the group. House House describes it as both an adventure and a place to spend time with friends, and that is a more accurate description than simply calling it a puzzle game.

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After two years in Early Access, Fields of Mistria has finally reached version 1.0. That distinction matters because NPC Studio’s farming and life simulation game has been unusually substantial for much of its development. The Early Access version already offered farming, mining, fishing, crafting, magic, relationships, town restoration and a large cast of villagers, but several important systems were deliberately incomplete. The full release adds the final stages of the town’s restoration, raises romance progression to ten hearts, introduces marriage and children, expands the mines and dungeon content, adds museum progression, new vendors, achievements and further quality-of-life improvements. More importantly, the main story and major progression systems can now be completed as originally intended.

The finished game is still unmistakably influenced by the modern farming-sim formula established by games such as Stardew Valley. You farm, raise animals, fish, mine, gather resources, improve your property, build relationships and help develop a small community. There is no attempt to hide those similarities, and Fields of Mistria is better for not pretending otherwise. Its identity comes from the details: a fantasy setting built around the return of magic, an unusually attractive pixel-art style, a large and expressive cast, forgiving progression and a collection of quality-of-life decisions that make its daily routine considerably less demanding than that of many games in the genre.

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For years, Game Freak has been defined by one series. That history makes Beast of Reincarnation more interesting than the average new action RPG, because its biggest achievement is not that it reinvents the genre. It is that it proves the studio behind Pokémon can build something with a completely different identity.

Instead of colorful creatures and turn-based battles, Beast of Reincarnation presents a bleak future Japan where humanity has been pushed to the edge of extinction. It is a game built around sword combat, exploration, and the relationship between Emma, a warrior carrying a mysterious burden, and Koo, her loyal canine companion. Its influences are easy to recognize, particularly in the way it approaches timing-based combat and enemy encounters, but the game’s strongest ideas come from the areas where it stops imitating and starts developing its own personality.

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Pirates have been a surprisingly rare theme in city-building games. Most games that fly the black flag focus on naval combat, exploration, or action, leaving the day-to-day business of running a pirate settlement largely unexplored. Corsair Cove, developed by Limbic Entertainment, approaches the fantasy from a different direction. Instead of casting players as a legendary captain chasing treasure across the seas, it asks them to build a thriving pirate colony from the ground up while balancing production, logistics, exploration, and the unruly needs of a growing crew.

The premise sounds familiar on paper. Gather resources, construct buildings, expand production, and unlock new technologies. The difference lies in how these systems interact. Nearly every mechanic in Corsair Cove feeds into another, creating a colony builder where efficiency matters just as much as expansion. The vertical design of the island forces players to think differently about movement and infrastructure, while naval expeditions ensure that success on land is closely tied to what happens at sea. Rather than feeling like two separate games stitched together, the city-building and piracy systems complement one another remarkably well.

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