Welcome back to This Week In Games Australia, your look at all the games you’ll be playing in the week ahead. This week, a quiet moment for AAA, with One Piece Odyssey as the sole major release. Elsewhere, the excellent Dragon Ball Z Kakarot arrives on next-gen, The Division 2 arrives on Steam, and a slew of exciting indies round out the week.
Let’s get into it.
January 9
Atrio: The Dark Wild (XSX, XBO)
Atrio: The Dark Wild is a survival/management game in which you spend a lot of time converting a hostile universe into a factory for mining resources. A cool premise, and the Mousetrap-style factory builds are honestly pretty amusing. One to watch if you’re a fan of the genre.
January 10
Glimmer in the Mirror (PC)
Glimmer in the Mirror is a 2D side-scrolling adventure shooter about a girl named Shiro who slowly unravels the mystery of what caused the collapse of her world. A really striking aesthetic on this one. I can see the cozy gamers getting around it in a big way.
January 12
Children of Silentown (PS5, XSX, PC, NS, PS4, XBO)
Described as a dark adventure game about a girl named Lucy investigating strange disappearances in her little town. In a world of monsters, disappearances are commonplace, but now, Lucy feels she is old enough to do something about them. Or so she thinks.
KartRider: Drift (PC, And, iOS)
A long time coming, KartRider: Drift is finally here, giving everyone without access to a Switch a taste of Mario Kart-style racing. It’s cross-platform, too, so you can race against friends on other systems, something Mario Kart definitely doesn’t let you do. For now, its pre-season launch phase will be on PC, Android, and iOS devices. Xbox and PlayStation versions arriving back into the cross-play pool with the arrival Season 1 content.
Lone Ruin (PC, NS)
Lone Ruin is an isometric dungeon crawler about a little mage on a quest to reach the bottom of a series of deep ruins. In the style of a roguelite crawler like Hades, you power up your spells and push forward, trying to see how far you can get on each run.
January 13
Aquatico (PC)
Aquatico is a survival city-builder in which you must construct and manage a facility on the ocean floor, dealing with the problems associated with creating dwellings under incredibly high oceanic pressure in areas teeming with sea life. Could you call this a Rapture-builder? Sure, if you want to.
Dragon Ball Z Kakarot (PS5, XSX)
The surprisingly good open-world DBZ game Kakarot finds its way to next-gen platforms this week. I’ve been around long enough to watch Dragon Ball video games go from muddy, angular polygonal messes to looking exactly like the TV show come to life. Kakarot is a big swing for an IP that has been content to pump out fighting games — some better than others — for the last 20 years. The one downside is that if you’re a fan, you’ll need to slog through all the same old plot beats from the show yet again.
Dusk ’82 (NS)
Wait a minute, I hear you say. Isn’t Dusk already available for the Switch? It is, yes. But this is a different Dusk. This is Dusk, de-made. Dusk ’82 is a retro demake of New Blood’s popular boomer shooter that turns it into a 30-level puzzle game. Genius, really. Get around it.
One Piece Odyssey (PS5, XSX, PC, PS4, XBO)
Bouncing from Kakarot to One Piece Odyssey, the other big RPG based on an anime. I’ve not had the chance to play this one yet, so it’s hard to say if it can match Kakarot‘s level of polish, but I daresay that won’t matter to the One Piece turbofans in the audience. After years of wonky, half-baked RPGs and fighters, may Odyssey finally be the game you’ve waited for.
In fact, this presents a perfect moment to post my favourite One Piece opening. Do not try to correct me in the comments. This is the best one.
Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 (PC)
This week in Games Finally Making The Jump From Ubisoft Connect to Steam: The Division 2. Not a new release, by any stretch, but if you’ve wanted to add it to your Steam library, now you can.
Under Dungeon (XSX, PC, NS, XBO)
Under Dungeon is a genre-bending retro-styled game about a little cat on a big adventure. There are so many influences here it’s hard to keep track — Undertale, certainly. Single-screen adventure games like the original Zelda for sure. Old FPS games like Wolfenstein. I can see some Castlevania 2 DNA in there. Wild, all the way down. Interested to check it out.
Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider (PC)
Vengeful Guardian: Moonrider reminds me of playing Shinobi on my Mega Drive and I can’t pay it much higher praise than that.
Next week
Coming up next week is Fire Emblem Engage on the Switch, and a shitload of amiibo to go with it. We’ll see see you then.
Leave a Reply