Another (2?) week(s), another newsletter! Here are my picks for this week in this totally weekly newsletter on the new releases and newly surging games I’ve picked up this week.
This week’s edition is heavily focused on games in their early stages, these are games that show a lot of promise, but aren’t quite there yet. With continued work though, these all have the potential to be very successful experiences.
Let’s get right into it!
High Iron [Alpha], Train Simulation
This railway simulation game was created just 4 months ago, and has only seen 30,000 visits. This comes in part because it’s still in paid access, at 25 Robux to enter.
While High Iron definitely has some areas for improvement, particularly in first time player onboarding and objectives for players to work toward, it’s clear that the lack of these are purely because of how new this game is. What’s here is brilliantly made, the trains themselves are meticulously designed and have full animated movement, there’s already a good selection of trains to choose from, too.
The game map is detailed but small currently, but with time, I’m sure this will improve. I can’t wait to see what comes next with map expansion and solutions to the general chaos that tends to arise from trains blocking the tracks, derailments and crashes.
Judging by badges, about 8,940 people have bought access to High Iron so far.
The Eastern War, Military Simulation
The eastern war is a new, large scale all out war milsim game. Explosions, tanks, trucks, helicopters, a huge map and great graphical fidelity, and it’s just 1 month old. It seems to be modelled off the popular Steam game Squad. The game feels great, it looks great, and the functionality is incredible.
However, the game has a lot of problems, on my second play session I got stuck in the main menu in a server without being able to see squads or deploy, and had to restart the game. The UI could absolutely do with some work, it’s pretty poorly optimised, getting bumpy FPS playing on automatic graphics with a gaming PC generally capable of playing triple A titles at medium settings smoothly.
This, though, does not change how impressive what’s already there is – the matchmaking and server system, the scale of the battles you take part in, and how clean the functionality that does work is. Just like Squad, be prepared to spend at least half of your time walking or running around the map just to get to the fight. I just wish this game had a map like Squad does, to see your team mates, enemy markers and objectives from the field as you play.
At time of writing, the game the game has 444k visits, you can see the trailer here.
Just 19 days ago, on the 1st of April, this game had just 10,000 visits. With consistent updates and improvements this game will surely go to big places.
I do have some concern with just how similar this is to Squad. The developers of the game are clearly capable and have done an amazing job, but they might be cutting it a little too close here.
Recarna, Combat/ RPG/ Open World
By Malding Corp
Recarna is, again, very early in development. The map is small and there are relatively few things to do, but there’s a fully functional combat system, great visual style, functioning NPC interactions that hold a state – i.e. they will remember what they last talked to you about, but there’s not much else done in the game yet.
This is, it seems, as expected, as the game is very new and it’s only open for a combat test. It appears that this game is likely going to become an open world combat RPG, and I hope it gets there.
The biggest problem with the game right now, though, is that the interface you see when you first load it is buggy at best, and at worst completely unusable. I played this game twice and wrote it off before finally coming back to it and figuring out how to actually get into the game world. This is a simple fix for the developers to get more players in, and judging by the number of people in the game – once they get past that hurdle, even at this stage with very little content to the game, people are retaining.
Surprisingly, this game is 6 months old, being created in October 2023. At the beginning of 2024 it had just a couple of hundred visits, but that now stands at 60,000. I would predict that with more expansion at the same standard of quality already present in the game, that could easily be billions within a few years.
Honorable Mentions
Protect the president – 500,000 visits at time of writing
Last Night – 1.4M visits at time of writing, protect an artic base from monster attacks
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