The real-time strategy genre has long been at home in the PC ecosystem; a keyboard and mouse allow you to easily position units and issue commands in a way that is significantly more difficult on a gamepad. This isn’t to say a few brave developers haven’t tried to make RTS work on console, such as Milky Tea Studios with their alt-history project Grit and Valor – 1949.

Similar to the Wolfenstein series, the game presents a different version of the Second World War in which technology has progressed far beyond where it was in real life; battles are now fought with pilots in mechs as opposed to standard infantry soldiers. It’s not the most original concept (there’s plenty of WWII media that tries to put its own spin on the conflict) but the steampunk aesthetic presents as charming nonetheless.

Grit and Valor is a roguelite, asking players to progress through multiple boards with randomized nodes, culminating in a boss fight. Nodes will offer combat encounters, text-based decisions, and shops where you can purchase upgrades. The ability to choose your route is appreciated; you’ll be able to evaluate whether your team can realistically clear the area, or if a run should be dedicated strictly to gathering resources.

When you’re inevitably forced into combat, the skirmishes take place on square-shaped maps, often littered with cover, high ground, and additional objectives. Despite having a grid-based layout, all units still move in real-time, so you’ll need to make decisions quickly. Thankfully, the developers implemented the ability to pause the entire battle, letting you breathe and issue orders with a bit more comfort. It’s a shrewd balancing choice, almost certainly made to accommodate the console audience.

Effectiveness in the field is governed by the rock-paper-scissors of Grit and Valor’s mech types: ballistics trump flamethrowers, fire beats explosives, and grenades dominate bullets. It’s immediately easy to wrap your head around, and units will actually autoattack when enemies enter their range. Gameplay is largely relegated to just deciding where mechs should move, though the real depth comes from your unit customization.

Pilots selection proves to be rather disappointing. Each possesses a unique ability, but they fail to make an impact. None of them present any interesting ideas (AOE attacks, deployable mines, etc) so I often forgot about them. The only abilities that I routinely used were for healing, but that was more out of necessity than a genuine desire to interact with the game’s mechanics.

Modules are both more mentally stimulating and effective in battle. As you clear missions, you’ll acquire scrap. You can use this currency to craft modules within the Mech Yard, which will provide boosts to stats like damage, health, and armor among others. Eventually you’ll unlock the ability to fuse lower-level modules and replace them with better options. Furthermore, if your mech surpasses certain power thresholds, you can overclock it, fitting it with additional perks.

Each run you embark on will also shower you with randomized enhancements following an enemy wave. It’s a great way to experiment building your mechs in different ways, or double down on stats already buffed by your modules. Seeing your units excel in specific areas can make you feel like a tactical genius, and enemy scaling is appropriate such that the game never feels too easy nor excessively punishing. Of course, enhancements leave you as soon as the run ends, so you’re going to need a bit of luck to grab your favorites consistently.

Grit and Valor is an admirable effort for the underserved, if incredibly niche, console RTS market. Unit customization and teambuilding grabbed my attention more than the moment-to-moment action itself, though some diehards may chalk that up to traditional genre conventions. If you’re a fan of the roguelite formula and willing to dabble in alternate gameplay types, this is certainly worth a look.

If you’ve followed KEMCO’s steady stream of retro-leaning RPGs, Astral Takers will feel like a warm cup of déjà vu. Developed by VANGUARD and published by KEMCO, the game launched on July 31, 2025 across PC (Steam), PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and mobile, promising an adventure built around a summoning system, bite-sized quests, and a classic top-down presentation.

Simple and enjoyable

You play as Revyse, a young summoner apprenticed to Master Volgrim, whose path crosses with Aurora, an amnesiac girl tied to mysteries bigger than either of them. It’s a familiar hook, lost memories, hidden powers etc. But it provides enough propulsion for a road-trip party JRPG with frequent story interludes and town stops. The official materials lean into the “shape your fate with the power of summoning” angle, which frames most systems you’ll engage with for 20–30 hours depending on your appetite for side quests.

Astral Takers keeps its progression linear. You move from region to region, hit a dungeon, watch a scene, and pick up a few optional errands before continuing. That linearity is a double-edged sword: it keeps the friction low and the story moving, but it also limits the sense of discovery. While the summoning twist gives party management a gentle rhythm, exploration and dialogue don’t always keep pace, sometimes dragging between highlights.

So faithful to classics that it feels like a re-release

Astral Takers’ calling card is its summoning. You recruit and fight alongside “astrals” which are summoned heroes that slot into your party flow much like traditional companions. In practice, this means turn-based battles that are easy to parse, where the tactical interest comes from timing skills, swapping astrals to cover weaknesses, and pulling off simple synergy chains. The combat loop as straightforward and approachable rather than systems-dense. In other words, it’s comfort food for fans of SNES/PS1-era design. If you’re craving a crunchy build meta or radical innovations, this isn’t that.

On the presentation front, Astral Takers aims for clean pixel-adjacent 2D/HD visuals with expressive portraits and bright spell effects. It’s not a showpiece, but it is crisp and readable across platforms, with light touches (summon animations, scene framing) adding charm. The PlayStation 5 version hit me with a familiar feeling. Nostalgia, cheerful, and easy on the eyes, with no obvious performance snags.

My Conclusion

Astral Takers feels like a deliberate “comfort JRPG” perfect for those 1-3 hour sessions to kill some time. A low-stress, linear romp with a likable party, dependable turn-based fights, and a summoning wrinkle that keeps encounters from going stale. It rarely overreaches and, as a result, rarely dazzles. If you grew up on 16-/32-bit RPGs and want something you can chip away at in short sessions on a weeknight or commute, this scratches that itch. If you’re hunting for bold narrative swings, open-ended builds, or modern design risks (think branching jobs, tactical grid depth, or roguelite-adjacent experimentation), you’ll likely bounce off its safe choices.

I am not exactly ready for Out and About. I don’t think Walking Simulator should be a mark for shame, especially when your game has many different features and mechanics. However, if all those mechanics make me sleepy, we need to reevaluate the situation.

Developed and published by Yaldi Games, Out and About is a cosy 3D foraging adventure with cooking mechanics.

There is only so much walking around and looking at plants within an interface that makes you want to rip your hair out that you can take. Out and About never took off in any direction worth feeling excited for. It is all talking to lifeless characters or interacting with or cooking random items found in the game.

Out and About for some WEED

The idea at play, in Out and About, is exploring and foraging. As a young adult on an escape from zombie concrete life, you walk around a large forest and a little village, talking to people, gathering and noting down new species of plants, and eventually cooking them for one reason or another.

Most NPCs in Out and about are interactable, but talk in a very dull and suggestive set of dialogues that more often than not feel off.

As for the foraging part, it is insufferably boring. You find with small amounts of knowledge on plants. You use that knowledge to look at and detect different types of plants on the floor. Every time you find something new, it is added to your catalogue.

Rinse and Repeat, the game is complete.

The UI for most things in this game is very annoying. Not hard to control. Just annoying.

The Foraging System

Foraging in games should never feel like homework. At its best, it’s about discovery, pacing, and the thrill of uncovering something new. Whether that means stumbling across a rare resource, making a split-second choice, or pushing deeper into the unknown. 

What it should not be is sitting in front of a UI screen, squinting at nearly identical plants, and clicking through until the right answer appears. Systems like that don’t reward curiosity or risk; they just drain energy and attention.

When foraging is done right, it feels fast, intuitive, and layered with surprise. Games like survival sims or RPGs use foraging not only to feed crafting loops but also to create those tiny, exciting moments where your heart races after spotting something rare in the corner of your eye. 

That’s the standard: make it quick and satisfying, or make it engaging with a sense of mystery and reward.

In Out and About, the foraging system misses both marks. 

Instead of pulling players into a lively world of interaction, it reduces exploration to repetition. 

Walking around, cataloguing dull plant assets, and dragging them into menus isn’t a system; it’s a chore. Foraging shouldn’t lull players to sleep. It should spark wonder.

Out and About with a Thought

Out and About feels like a game with good intentions buried under lifeless execution. It wants to be a relaxing escape, a place where you wander, forage, and connect with a slower pace of life. But instead of delivering that meditative calm, it slips into monotony. Every mechanic. 

Whether walking, talking, or cooking, it leans toward dragging things out rather than giving players reasons to lean in.

The real tragedy is that the ingredients are all here: a beautiful setting, a core loop about exploration, and the promise of meaningful interaction. But nothing connects. Characters don’t inspire, foraging doesn’t excite, and the world feels more like a backdrop than a place worth inhabiting.

Walking simulators and slice-of-life adventures don’t need to be high-octane thrill rides to succeed. They just need to keep players curious and invested, moment to moment. 

Out and About never finds that spark. 

What should have been a thoughtful, cosy trek instead feels like wandering in circles, waiting for something interesting to happen. In the end, Out and About isn’t offensively bad. It’s just painfully dull. And in gaming, dull is the hardest sin to forgive.

I’ve always been a big fan of word games, I find them really enjoyable, challenging, and immersive which is why they appeal to me. I especially enjoy Scrabble and Wordscapes, whilst I rarely play them nowadays I would still get a lot of enjoyment from them now, so when I first loaded up Birdigo which had similar elements to both I knew this game would be right up my street which it definitely was, it was fun and addicting, but the one thing that ruined it for me was the difficulty.

And boy was it challenging and grueling…

The ever increasing difficulty was its biggest issue.

Now I’m not one to shy away from games which are challenging, as a matter of fact I enjoy them a lot, I like having to plan ahead and think carefully on my next move, it makes completing a game feel so much more satisfying being rewarded for your perseverance and planned out strategies. With that said it can be frustrating when it feels like no matter what new ideas you come up with or what different approaches you take, beating the game feels next to impossible, which is exactly how I felt after playing Birdigo for hours.

I failed at my first few attempts which I expected, so I didn’t think much of it at first, I was learning how the game worked so I knew that eventually I would get the hang of it and beat the first route which I did, but little did I know that was the furthest I would reach…

There are six different routes to beat, with each one having different amounts of stops (levels essentially). Each level has a specific distance requirement, so in order to progress to the next stop you had to reach the required amount. What I noticed quickly was that the requirement between one level and the next was very high, to the point where beating the stop seemed extremely difficult, which shouldn’t be the case if the previous level was somewhat beatable, so why did the requirement increase so much?

To make it challenging, of course. Which is absolutely understandable since a game which is too easy sometimes doesn’t feel worth playing, but the same goes for a game which is too challenging especially when it doesn’t have a difficulty setting. So as you can imagine I was slightly disappointed upon learning this, I really wanted to clear all the routes but it was just too hard. The first route as previously said I beat, it only had 14 stops and the last one required 1200 points, which mind you is still incredibly difficult, but because of the feathers and songs I got (I’ll explain more about those later) it was much easier.

Now the second route which had 27 stops is where the requirements became ridiculous, the furthest I got was around halfway and that was because I needed 3000 points to reach level 15. I only needed 1200 points for the last level on the first route and 3000 points midway through the second route? Yeah, that seems like a pretty unrealistic and extremely big jump in score, and for those wondering your score doesn’t carry over from the first route, so you have to start from zero each time. To make matters worse, if you fail a stop you have to start all the way from the beginning of the route. So as you can imagine, this game isn’t very forgiving.

There’s also another mode called daily migration which is just a new route every single day, it’s essentially an endless mode, but don’t be mistaken it’s still as hard as the main mode, albeit slightly more doable. That’s because there are only around 14-16 stops each day but the score requirements still increase dramatically which still makes it quite challenging. You only have two feathers to help you from stop two to seven, which at first seems fine but you need 400 points to pass the seventh stop and if the choices of feathers you got were bad then you may as well give up. As I said earlier, I’ll talk more about them and songs later, since they’re the key to helping you progress.

Despite the challenge, it was still fun and addictive.

Ignoring the mildly frustrating difficulty of Birdigo for one moment, I still thought it was an addictive and enjoyable game. Each time I failed a stop/route I would instantly want to go back to and beat it, it was one of those games that despite failing multiple times you couldn’t help but want to jump straight back in to get a new personal best or completely clear the level. It wasn’t just the addictive aspect that kept me playing though, I really liked the art style, and the whole concept of beating stops to help birds migrate across different countries. It was a really calm game.

The word calm isn’t often associated with many video games nowadays, and that’s purely because most of them are competitive, tense, and require lots of concentration, so playing a game which has no expectations is always enjoyable for me, which is why I really enjoy word and puzzle games, they’re very relaxing, immersive, fun, and addictive which is exactly what Birdigo was.

The power-ups were very luck dependent and determined whether or not you would complete a route.

I’ve mentioned feathers and notes a couple of times before since they’re extremely important, essentially they’re the power-ups you receive to help you gain more points and progress. Unfortunately though they are very luck based, some playthroughs you’ll get some of the best and most effective feathers and notes, but other times you’ll get the worst ones possible, which rarely benefit you. It does kind of suck that completing a route entirely depends on the feathers and notes you get to choose from, that paired with the extremely demanding score requirements each stop makes it very challenging and does ruin the gameplay.

Now to give you some more insight into feathers and notes, you can have a maximum of five feathers and two notes each route, both of which are and do different things. Feathers don’t have a one-time use, they last throughout the whole route and either increase your power or flaps which is how the points system works (flaps X power). Some are much better than others and have a bigger impact on your score, allowing you to build around specific lengths of words. During my playthrough I always went with the one which increased your power if you played three letter words, along with the one which also increased your power if the number of letters in your words were odd, those two paired together made for some really high scoring words, making it easier to progress.

Of course I also had other feathers on top of that which helped a lot and made meeting the score requirement much easier. There were a couple of ones which were high-risk high-reward, but being able to meet their conditions increased your score massively. I always chose the one when available, which added 30+ flaps if the word played ended in an “ING” simply because if I managed to get those specific letters I would be able to get a score of around 1000, which put me in a great position to progress. Of course I didn’t always get those specific letters because again, luck played a part in letters I would receive from discards.

Sticking on the topic of discards, you started with four each route and it allowed you to replace all of the letters in your hand with new ones. You could increase the amount of discards you had to five, but that depended on if you found that specific feather in the shop or after completing a specific stop which gives you the choice between three feathers as a reward. Of course it was a risk in itself, there were many times when I used a discard only to get 1 vowel and worse letters than I already had, which put me in a much worse position.

It’s also worth mentioning that you start with only being able to play four words each stop, that however just like discards can be increased to five if you manage to get said feather. Being able to get those two in a playthrough along with other strong feathers massively increases the chances of success, you do have to get lucky enough to be able to get them, though.

Notes have a one time use each route, you attain them as a reward for completing a stop or by buying them at a shop using seeds, which you can gain depending on the amount of words you had left available to play after completing a stop. Like feathers, there are some which are much better than others and luck of course plays a part in it, the one which allows you to reset words available to play is extremely beneficial and is probably the best one, having that note helps you with stops that have an extremely demanding score requirement. But you could also be unfortunate enough to get the note which turns some letters into speckled ones, which is one of the weaker ones.

For context there are four different types of letters, normal, speckled, gold, and platinum. Each one gives you different points when played and also meets requirements of specific feathers. You can buy upgraded letters from the shop and get them as a reward after specific stops. I felt like I’ve said this word so many times but yes luck does play a part in if you get gold and platinum letters in your starting hand or after discards.