Topic: Warside

The demo is out on Steam, the interface is a bit clunky (despite mouse feeling like a natural fit in theory), but there's a few campaign missions to play with.

My thoughts:
Presentation: a bit meh. Like sure, detailed pixel art sprites, but they look a bit "heavy". Factions only differ in colors (nothing like the clean difference between factions in Advance Wars) and the character portraits aren't as charming, at least not for the blue "hero" faction. I played a few of the available missions but so far it doesn't look like there will be faction switching in story mode, like in WarGroove (I hope I'm wrong on this one). Music is not memorable at all. Nothing like the bassy tunes of Max or western vibe of Grit's theme so far.

Gameplay: It's actually more WarGroove than AW. I like that it feels more "modern military" than WW2 (read: IFVs instead of unarmed APCs, sniper units, only one Tank aside from the fantasy megatank and Rhino). Transports work very differently from AW: you can't embark and disembark on the same turn, but when disembarking the unit can do a full move, including an attack and capture (ranged units still can't shoot though, I guess that count as movement). Cities work like in WarGroove, as in units can't enter them, and they switch hands quite a lot. And you can build multiple units from the same Factory or Barracks in the same turn, so you get a big army faster.

In general I feel like this is a good evolution of the genre. Hopefully they don't repeat the mistakes of WarGroove and ReBoot camp regarding multiplayer.