FF12 meets Dune by way of the Pacific Front, with a healthy dose of late-Tsarist aesthetic.

In a game mixing strategy and side-scrolling shoot-em-up, you lead the last remnants of the once-grand Romani Empire's airship fleet on a desperate battle to regain control of the troubled Republic of Gerat - meeting with local allies, dodging Gathering strike fleets, taking Cities, and eventually making your way to Khiva.

To make your way there successfully, you have to take charge of a motley group of ships, beginning with the remnants of the Romani fleet and expanding with every local leader you meet or mercenary you hire. You may be The Empire, but you're on the back-foot here - if you stay in one place too long, you'll be reported and destroyed, and the threat of strike fleets hovers over you like a ghost.

You have countermeasures, though - through a sort-of minigame, you can decode communications. If you choose to use aircraft, and you're good at it, you can carpet-bomb strike fleets before they know who they're facing - cruise missiles are an option, too. You can go into the open desert, and see if you find anything there. Mostly, though, you'll be behind enemy territory, outgunned, outnumbered, and with little support.

Giving away most details of the plot would be spoilery, but i did quite enjoy the experience of winning over a motley crew to your side - done through a slightly-opaque card minigame, but everyone you can recruit tends to be a bit more interesting. I would have liked more "Fluff" events to flesh them out a bit more - give you more of a reason to care about them rather than the game telling you that you gotta. The one thing that knocks half a star off is that, pending future updates, the ending feels a bit unsatisfying.

The UI is immersive to a fault, and is wonderfully appointed in the bakelite dials and CRT screens of a Soviet cruiser. The ship design interface is fun, but I'd like if, for example, your designed ships showed up naturally. Updates have made most of the more visually confusing features toggles, so that aspect of many early reviews has been looked into.

For all those reasons above, the unique aesthetic, and the general feeling of being up at 2am, down 3 cruisers, and high-tailing it to Khiva as 3 strike groups tail you, I think Highfleet is one of my favorite games.

Derail Valley takes a different path than most train simulators in a couple ways. It's fully VR, which means you interact with every lever yourself if you choose to, and includes - as the name suggests - fun-to-play-with derailment physics.

DV's most important point-of-divergence is the setting and trains. Rather than try and painstakingly analyze and replicate a real area, DV is a genericized, but believable playground which could easily fit anywhere in Southern Europe. It being generic by no means indicates a lack of care - every detail in the map makes it obvious Altfuture meant it as a love letter to their native Serbia.

This extends to the trains. While most obviously take some inspiration - the DE2 from various small Czech shunters, the DE4 from German center-cab diesels, the DE6 from EMD's Export lineup, and the S060 being easily recognizable as a S100 0-6-0 Tank Engine, they aren't exactly 1:1 replications. However, this doesn't matter - every lovingly crafted spot of rust, dust, dirt, and wear on a given locomotive makes it as believable as anything in TSW.

Gameplay, for me, does occasionally get boring. It's mostly a loop of running trains to and from the various industries, and getting access to bigger locomotives and contracts that way. Some of it is convoluted, but most of it is pretty sensible. You also have to be careful not to derail or wreck your train - again, a main focal point of it, but not entirely unenjoyable if you fail.

The devs haven't really given any reason for us to believe they'll go back on their promises - and so, hopefully in a couple years DV will be extended with fully-fledged passenger service and electrification.