HomeFeatures
Our most anticipated strategy games of 2021Fear the mighty tread of Horaszdóttir
Fear the mighty tread of Horaszdóttir
It is the fearsome giantess Horaszdóttir. The harshest of all deities. The winter god of game releases yet to come. She has come again, to push our faces to the turkey giblets, and make us see and tell of the desires we hold - desires for games in 2021. Unbidden, the words come to us, and we must describe our most anticipated titles for the year ahead. What will it be today, dread Horaszdóttir? Only tell us, and we will obey! Ah, it is the tricksy genre, that beloved of warmongers and managers, builders and battlers. It is… strategy games!
Humankind
Humankind Gameplay And Impressions | The Pepsi To Civilization’s Coca Cola?Watch on YouTube
Humankind Gameplay And Impressions | The Pepsi To Civilization’s Coca Cola?
Nate:I feel so guilty that I can never find a way to start talking about Humankind without essentially positioning it as the Pepsi to the Coke of Sid Meier’s Civilization. The game, which is a heavily hyped, all-in “magnum opus” from developer Amplitude, clearly wants to prove that there can be more than one benchmark when it comes to 4X games covering the whole of human history. And having played an early version last year, I’m inclined to say it’s got a fair shot at that objective indeed.
It’s still played on hex tiles with distinct eras to pass through, and giant men wandering about the landscape, but beyond this basic pack of common denominators, there’s a lot to differentiate Humankind from its rival. Customisable, composite civilisations drawing from multiple historical cultures, ambitious tactical battle instances of the kind seen in Endless Legend, and some deeply satisfying urban sprawl, all make me eager indeed to summon Ghoastus and get Roming come April.
Inkulinati
Alice Bee:You know when you see a tweet that has about 20K retweets, and it’s something like “medieval monk: yeah of course i know what a hare looks like lol”, with, attached, several photos of extremely cursed drawings from illuminated manuscripts, depicting sad rabbits that variously look like they just remembered they left the gas on, one of their parents was a human man, or they’ve been stored inside a gravy boat for their entire life, etc. etc.? In Inkulinati, those animals are forced to do turn-based battle across the pages of a book.
There is something quite Monty Python (I refuse to treat the term ‘Pythonesque’ as if it were a real world) in the sound effects, and the way the battling illustrators' live-action hands interact with the book. And many of the attacks are fairly scatalogical but so were a good deal of the medieval illustrations as shared on Twitter, so what are you going to do? Despite that, it looks like the actualtacticalaspect is serious and complex. There are buffs, debuffs, special attacks, and little sneaky things like pushing - so you can push enemies right off the book. A lot going on, plus funny animals, means this remains one to keep an eye on.
Evil Genius 2: World Domination
Alice Bee:I played the originalEvil Genius, but I wasn’t overly excited for the sequel - until I got to play a preview build of the tutorial, and then I was like, “Hell yeah, I remember why this concept is so cool now!”. It’s a base builder, but the base is that of a Bond villain who’s really playing into the tropes. You have minions in yellow jumpsuits and goggles who build everything for you, a whole separate screen for managing your nefarious schemes around the world, and you even have to staff and man a front operation - a casino.
Once you get into the nitty gritty, it becomes surprisingly complicated. You can even set individual roulette wheels in said casino to ‘scam tourists’ mode. But it’s also funny - think Theme Hospital - with really great little animations for things like interrogations of enemy agents, or your guards incinerating a bodybag. I doubt I will ever achieve world domination, but I can at least fill up a couple of vaults with gold, and I shall enjoy doing it.
Pharaoh: A New Era
Nate:This one is, as we say in theCavern Of Lies, “classic Nate bait”. The original Pharaoh (off of the year 1999) is one of my favourite city builders ever, and indeed one of my favourite games ever. I bark on about it all the time, and so it’s inevitable that I’d be excited for a remake. I do wish there was more to it than simply ULTRA GIGA HD, as purely cosmetic strategy remakes always strike me as a missed opportunity, but I was due a replay of Pharaoh anyway, and I certainly won’t complain if it looks nicer this time round.
Builders Of Egypt
Spacebase Startopia
Alice Bee:I loved the originalStartopia. God, I loved it so hard. Still do! And when I poked my head in on the beta of this unofficial spiritual successor (unofficial but leaning really, really hard on the collective nostalgia for the original, and clomping around in its shoes and make-up in a pretty shameless way), it looked like it was heading in the right direction. You’ve got your different alien types with different needs, your different decks on your space station (my favourite being the entertainment deck where you can build a massive disco), and competing cost/benefit analysis for all your different services.
Total War: Warhammer III
[PEGI/ENG] Total War: WARHAMMER III Announce Trailer - Conquer Your Daemons | Coming 2021Watch on YouTube
[PEGI/ENG] Total War: WARHAMMER III Announce Trailer - Conquer Your Daemons | Coming 2021
Nate:It’s easy to be fairly confident in anticipating great things from Twarhammer 3, because it’s notreallya new game, it’s just the third chunk of the behemothTotal War: Warhammerproject. I don’t say “just” to diminish it at all, mind. If it’s anywhere near the scale ofTwarhammer 2, it’ll be one of the bigger Total War games to date in its own right. And just as was the case with the second instalment, it’ll be possible to bolt it onto the existing duology, to create an even bigger composite map with even more factions warring across it. It’s essentially an expansion pack, then - but one so vast that it will have its own string of expansion packs. And hopefully,one of those expansions-to-an-expansionwill bring ogres to the game at long last.
