Sky Noon
Steam Page
Released: June 15
Developer: Lunar Rooster
Publisher: Reverb Triple XP
Price: $14.99
Sky Noon is a competitive first-person shooter with a focus on high speed aerial combat and grappling hook shenanigans. It takes place in a “reimagined” wild west, and by “reimagined”, studio Lunar Rooster mean this particular wild west is situated on floating islands, with an art style reminiscent of a more comic-styled Bioshock Infinite. Other tools and powers come into competitive play: you’ve got a lasso and it’s possible to get a jetpack, while the maps are strewn with jump pads and teleporters. It supports up to six-players online across seven maps, and there’s a single-player time trial mode too. I saw some of this in action at PAX Australia last year and it looked really fun.
Cuisine Royale
Steam Page
Released: June 16
Developer: Darkflow Software
Publisher: Gaijin Distribution KFT
Price: Free for a limited time
Yes, it’s a joke battle royale game with a name that riffs on PUBG’s famed bulletproof kitchenware, and yes, you can deck your character out in colanders and pans and all that… kitchen-y stuff. But apparently it’s pretty good! Created (as a joke) by the studio responsible for tactical WWII shooter Enlisted, Cuisine Royale supports 30 players per session but has a few neat tricks: there are collectible power-ups, loot boxes strewn throughout the environments, and very stupid cosmetics. None of this would usually convince me to try Cuisine Royale, but it’s currently free until June 25, with over 1,290 Steam reviews culminating in a “mostly positive” ranking.
Budget Cuts
Steam Page
Released: June 14
Developer: Neat Corporation
Publisher: Neat Corporation
Price: $29.99
Budget Cuts is a VR-only game about being an office worker, except instead of crunching numbers or stamping envelopes or making incessant cups of tea, you’re engaged in a violent dispute with robots. It’s justified, mind you: these robots want to take your job. The combat is close quarters and the game was built with room-scale VR in mind, but it’s the writing that got everyone excited when Budget Cuts debuted as a demo in 2016. As for this final version, it appears to be more of the same but better, and the Steam reviews thus far are sitting on “very positive” overall.
Overwhelm
Steam Page
Released: June 12
Developer: Ruari O’Sullivan
Publisher: Untitled Publisher
Price: $9.99
Overwhelm is an arcade-style platformer with a focus on gunplay. While it’s not a rogue-like (there’s no randomised levels, for a change), this is a three-lives-and-start-again affair, so approach it with a lot of patience. One of the neater twists is that once you’ve killed a boss, that enemy’s special powers will be inherited by the regular enemies. This means you’ll need to think about which bosses you’ll kill first, and the game’s difficulty curve definitely rachets up the more of these major enemies you take down. Definitely worth checking out if you’re into masocore stuff and love the colour red.
Protolife
Steam Page
Released: June 16
Developer: Volcanic Giraffe
Publisher: Volcanic Giraffe
Price: $11.99
Protolife is a tower-based defense game with strong real-time strategy elements. You’re tasked with managing a colony on Gagarin-5, which was trucking along quite nicely until some kind of “corruption” spread across the lands, ushering in some giant earth-devouring worms. According to studio Volcanic Giraffe, this enemy is a “growing, living entity designed to exploit every weakness in your defense”. In other words, it’s not just gonna march up to your fortifications and bash away at them. I like the art style, and for $12 it looks like a pretty satisfying and complex affair.
These games were released between 06/17-06/10. The first page of this list is updated every Sunday and previous weeks are archived on the following pages. Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.
