What do you get when you pit 16 heavily armed strangers against hordes of alien bugs and teamwork-centric objectives? The complete and utter chaos of Starship Troopers: Extermination.
Sometimes that chaos is full of fun and spectacle. There is something incredible about standing on a wall with your fellow soldiers firing at a tide of aliens who are more than happy to climb over the bodies of their fallen brethren to scale your defenses.
Far Cry: Escape from Rook Islands is based on Far Cry 3, a video game released back in 2012. Its cast of characters, many game mechanics, and even its thematic feel are pulled and remodeled for the board game adaption. You don’t need to be a fan of the Far Cry video game series to play Escape from Rook Islands, but there is a lot to appreciate if you love the series like I do.
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.