Fans of XCOM will find the gameplay of Taskforce familiar: you control a squad of heavily armed soldiers, and each turn you plan their moves. Each has a limited number of action points to spend, and movement, firing, and other actions require you to spend points. Opponents can 'opportunity fire' at you if you enter their field of fire (and they have action points remaining from last turn), so even though this is an "I move/you move" game, there's a sense of interactivity between the players as you move. Once you're finished with your turn, the other side performs its own actions under the control of the AI.

As with the original XCom games (and Laser Squad Nemesis), the result is gameplay utterly different from today's conventional shooters; winning requires painstaking planning and careful scouting, rather than the ability to manipulate controls quickly.

With 30 missions, many of them homages to B-movies (can you say "zombies"?), there's a wealth of gameplay here for those who like strategy games that actually make them think.

Psychic Detective Graphic Adventure
From the Creator of The Shivah

Dave Gilbert continues his career as the auteur of a new school of old school graphic adventures with The Blackwell Legacy, the first of a series of planned games featuring freelance writer Rosangela Blackwell.

In this first outing, Rosangela comes to grips with her powers--or affliction, as it may be--and is forced to deal with a haunted dog run in Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park. Helping her out is the mysterious Joey Mallone, a fedora-wearing ghost whose dialog is straight out of Raymond Chandler and who has apparently been haunting her family since the 1940s.

Medieval Real-Time Strategy With Clever AI

The Dark Legions is a surprisingly polished RTS game developed from a "lone wolf" developer--Marcell Baranyai did almost everything, from its 3D engine to its graphics and sound design, a pretty amazing effort.

Innovative it is not, particularly; fans of Warcraft and Age of Empires will find it familiar, and easy to pick up and play. There's the usual resource extraction, building construction, and combat you'd expect in an RTS title. Where Dark Legions shines, however, is in its AI--computer opponents have some tricks up their sleeves (like sending slaves behind your lines to extract resources near your camp before you exploit them) that you haven't seen before.

If you're in the mood for an RTS fix, this game may be just the ticket--and at a reasonable price.

The Egg Files is a game that requires lightning quick reflexes, samurai spirit and a will to power. OK, maybe it does not need all that but it is fun. At least that's what the judges at the Independent Games Festival thought.

In this game you play Mr. Rooster and your mission is to thwart an army of interloping aliens from abducting all the chickens in the world... they're crazy about eggs - we're not sure why.

The Eternal City is a long-running multiplayer prose game, developed and administered by Worlds Apart Productions. It is being published online by Skotos Tech under license.

You are the leader of a powerful Order of Sorcerors. Having defeated mankind's greatest enemy, the Demon Hordes, you retreat to Haven for a life of peaceful seclusion.

One day, after many decades, your retirement is shattered by signs of an old, familiar danger: the Demons have returned! You return to find the Order slaughtered, monstrous creatures roaming the landscape, and humanity on the run.

It's Delightful, It's De-Lovely, It's... Pretty Damn Strange

The Noks is about the weirdest game I've seen this year. I'm tempted to call it "indescribable," except we need to describe it, eh?

Partly, it's a game of collectibles. There are several hundred "Noks" in the world at present, and the developers plan to add more over time. You can think of Noks as something like, say, Magic: The Gathering cards, except that they aren't cards. They're animated 3D avatars with backstories. Some of them sing songs or perform music. And most have something to tell you about the game itself, or the backstory of the Noks universe. To understand that universe, you'll need to collect--well maybe not "them all," but lots of them.

Control Winds and Currents with the Mouse

Set in the world of Homeric myth, The Odyssey is a level-based casual game in which you have to guide your ships from one end of the level to the other in the face of monsters, storms, and other obstacles. What's interesting (and innovative) about it, however, is the control scheme--you move your ships by holding down the mouse button and drawing in the water to create currents, and by changing the direction and strength of the winds by moving the mouse within a wind-control region of the screen.

Rabbi Stone Has a Crisis of Faith

Before we go any farther, please notice the headline. When was the last time you heard a game described in remotely similar terms?

Shivah is the Jewish mourning ritual. For a week after a family member's death, the family stays at home, receiving visitors, and mourning the deceased.

Rabbi Stone, this game's protagonist, leads a small and declining congregation on the Lower East Side. He receives word that a somewhat disreputable former congregant has died, and left his small estate to the synagogue. Though he himself is close to losing faith in God, he views it as his duty to investigate, and perhaps to comfort whatever family members this man may have as they sit Shivah.

Sigma Team's Alien Shooter was a highly polished, elegant little third-person shooter that gained glowing reviews everywhere--everywhere that bothers to review indie games, of course. With Theseus: Return of the Hero, the developers return with an equally polished, even better looking Rambo-esque shooter with a slightly different backstory (but in games of this type, does story matter a whit, anyway?)

If this game style appeals to you, Theseus is best-in-breed at present; give it a shot. Or, you know, many, many shots in rapid succession, as it were.