MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries is a sandbox-style mech game where you pilot huge hulks of twisted steel and sex appeal. If sex appeal took the form of cannons the size of a Greyhound bus and pods with enough rockets to blot out the sun. You pilot these beautiful machines in either first or third person, but you don’t simply play with a single mech.
Wild Bastards is a rogue-lite strategy shooter and that fact alone is going to make it a divisive experience, especially in today’s dopamine-hungry, power fantasy climate fueled by low attention spans that take offense at the mere mention of rubbing two brain cells together in order to play a game.
Orcs Must Die 3 is a third-person cooperative tower defense game without the towers. Instead, you have an arsenal of traps you can use to set up diabolical combinations of death-dealing hazards that would even make Jigsaw blush underneath his creepy mask.
Death Roads: Tournament essentially turns Mad Max into a deck-building game, and I feel like that idea deserves an award on its own. What’s particularly impressive is that Death Roads is not simply Slay the Spire with cars. It’s a very unique deck-building game that plays off of its vehicular combat theme in really novel ways.