There exists a competition where folks dawn armor, grab shields and blunted swords, and beat the crap out of each other. Something about experience of doing close combat the way the old Europeans did it ages ago. There’s an appeal to swing a big sword to slay the enemy with. Something even valiant about it, according to my reptile brain. That curiosity dies as soon as I remember that the people you’d be hitting with swords will probably hit me back.

I think i’ll get my swordsmanship kick elsewhere. Maybe in the form of Mordhau, the multiplayer, medieval, melee game by new developer, Triternion. From a successful Kickstarter campaign, to a long alpha test, Mordhau is ready to charge its way to a full launch.

In Nine Dots Studio's survival RPG, Outward, you suck. There's no way around it. You get thrust onto a path of destiny that is way about your range, and you will find yourself punching above your weight most of the time. It will take some herculean efforts just to tread water, let alone avoid sinking altogether. The beginning hours are especially tough, and will make or break many potential heroes. Hopefully, with this list of beginner tips, you'll be one of the ones that make it.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is a difficult game. It's also somewhat vague and requires a lot of wandering before you can really get your bearings. With the following guide, I can only hope that we can cut down some of that wandering by pointing out some very useful advice that I wish I had when I started playing this instant classic from the twisted mind of Hidetaka Miyazaki.

As a follow up to Just Cause 4, Avalanche Studios couldn't have picked a more different game than they're reputation implies than Generation Zero. Just Cause is bombastic and full of Fast and the Furious-levels of shenanigans. Generation Zero is a dark and moody survival game pitting the remnants of man versus machines. Sometimes, you gotta switch it up.

FromSoftware has been forever immortalized as Action RPG royalty after a series of strong releases in games like Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne. These generation-defining games were so critically and commercially successful that they've created enough clones to make a whole subgenre. It's been some time since their last release, but FromSoft is in a great position to take back their throne with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice.

Respawn Entertainment shimmied their way into the headlines a couple of months ago when they sneak launched Apex Legends. The squad based battle royale has seemingly done the impossible since then - got an Internet full of people talking about a shooter that isn't Fortnite. Over the past couple weeks, the talk was increasingly about "what's coming next." It's been rumored for awhile that something big was coming, and just as the original game launched, Season 1 of Apex will crash onto the scene just hours after it was announced.

Corporations, with their fountain of resources and peerless edge in innovative technology, will be the first steps into the void of possibilities. If that goes anything like Satisfactory, the new survival sim from Coffee Stain Games (Goat Simulator), then we at least know those steps will be messy ones.

A game designed "for people who love supply chain management, bottleneck resolution, and finding clever automated solutions to transport problems" sounds more like a job description than an elevator pitch. That said, the city builder simulator genre is long-lasting one for good reason - people love problem solving! Erik Asmussen's Factory Town promises to provide plenty of opportunity for just that.

Norse mythology is the a hot commodity these days, thanks to smash games like Skyrim, tv shows like Vikings, and movies like Thor. It gets readopted and re-imagined fairly regularly. It's so old and jagged in it's original poetic forms that reinterpretation is almost required for it to make sense in modern scopes. So even as it becomes a more popular source, it still has plenty of new ways to look and sound when turned into a game. Enter Void Studios' new game, Eternity: The Last Unicorn.

Humans have advanced and evolved so much in the past 100 years, it's hard for us to really appreciate how long it took us to get to a place where we could be considered viable inheritors of the Earth. Madruga Games, makers of Planetbase, have adapted that colony-keeper formula in order to explore our early years as hunters and gathers in their next game, Dawn of Man.

The turn-based, multiplayer strategy space is usually dominated by games that can feel slow and plodding. Turns often feel like they can take forever, or the wait for your turn to come back can be excruciating. There's also something to the die roll or coin-flippy nature of randomness that's added to these games that can feel like all agency has been taken away from you. BATALJ hopes to be the change the genre needs, in both regards.

Firaxis Games' Civilization series is one of the most iconic series on the planet. It revolutionized the 4X — or explore, expand, exploit, exterminate — strategy game way back in the early '90s. That it continues to thrive well into 2019 is just a testament to how remarkable of a game Civilization is.

Space is the final frontier for mankind. It's an endless bounty of new and weird locations that can possibly hold eons old secrets, or maybe actively kill us. If were ever going to find something cool out there, we can't let the fear of the latter hinder our pursuit of the former. System Era Softworks' latest game, Astroneer, agrees.

Artifact has had some time to percolate in the wild, so naturally there's been a lot of time to examine the card set. It didn't take long for some stand outs to make themselves known, but some of the better cards have sort of snuck up on the meta as well. For any beginner who just cracked open their initial packs of cards and are wondering where to go from there, this list is for you.

We've been playing shooters loosely based on Middle Eastern conflicts for a while now. The War of Terror created a video game bubble that wouldn't burst until the early/mid 2010s, where most shooters moved on to grappling hooks in space and what not. Nowadays, if you want to even make a dent while existing in that setting, you need to be doing something remarkable. Insurgency: Sandstorm is up to that challenge.