Company of Heroes 3 is free to try and 50% off, so it's the best time to check out the beefy 2.0 overhaul - Related to ornate, heroes, out, tactics, card

As We Descend burrows beneath the other Frostpunk-likes with ornate card tactics and writing

This week, we're highlighting the best demos you can play during Steam Next Fest, which runs from February 24th until March 3rd. We call this Wishlisted.

Years ago I wrote a piece about what I presumptuously defined as the "emerging" subgenre of city games that respond to the climate crisis, with its attendant catastrophes of unchecked capitalism and resurgent fascism. Today, it feels dangerously like that subgenre is "sub" no longer.

We are engulfed in strategy sims where society is the rind between the formless terrors without and the only-human abusers within. The geography is clogged by Last Cities and Final Bastions Of Humanity, all of them awkwardly avoiding eye contact, like the prophets that line the alleyways of Life Of Brian. I guess it's in keeping with the "unchecked capitalism" bit that apocalypse fantasies have become a thriving business. I hope that's not my fault. On the brighter side, roguelike deckbuilder As We Descend is quite fun, combining moderately baroque turn-based combat with tales of Vernian dystopia. Here's Wot I Think of the demo.

In As We Descend, you dutifully take custody of another Terminal Metropolis, a crenellated steampunk diorama that huddles Frostpunk-style around a light source - not a coal generator, in this case, but an enormous golden hologram, which is possibly the god of the draconian theocracy you'll have to wrangle with as the latest, unwilling First Ranger.

For reasons currently unclear to me, your city is also a huge circular drill that is tunnelling to the centre of the Earth. On each level, you spend turns playing cards to access facilities and stories within the city. You'll also send expeditions into the surrounding caverns to recover technologies such as reactor rods, used to power the forcefields that safeguard your city's descent.

The local wildlife don't take kindly to this. That wouldn't be a problem if they were all roundworms and bacteria, but as with Anoxia Station, As We Descend has a nasty case of the megafauna. Enemies range in scale and threat level from gristle-filled balloons to massive, skinless Skeletors. Against these foes you shall pitch Age Of Sigmar-esque battalions of fragile arbalests, iron-palmed monks, tanks with tower shields, and clockwork soldiers, unlocked from run to run.

Battles see you distributing your units between two radial zones, while a smaller version of the big golden hologram slings ability cards from the rear. Units in the front zone auto-attack enemies between turns, but are naturally exposed to greater harm. The game's card alchemy feels appropriately compressed and dicey. There are cards that tether stat boosts to moving between zones, cards that cause units to "fixate", inflicting extra damage on a selected foe, while losing the ability to target others, and barrier cards to stave off unit wipes. All of which is powered by faith generated by your citizens, as long as you carry on completing quests for them.

I lost plenty of units in the demo - there's a nice sense of being fundamentally outmatched, and the longer you linger on a level, the more you're provoking a chonkier predator to attack your city directly. During my first run, my dystopaville fell to a crablike rhino that had the bad form to materialise after a series of expeditions, with all of my units at half-strength.

I'm wooed but not wowed by As We Descend's strategy-tactics sandwich. What lures me more is the glowering enigma of the city itself, whose art deco crevices teem with small, branching stories involving supercilious overseers and buff blacksmiths and the like. There's an agreeable stink of medieval politicking. Yes, humans are probably the real monsters here. Read more and find the demo on Steam - the full game's out on 27th March.

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You'll need to pay to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character beyond the first free redo

How long do you tend to spend creating a character in a video game? The correct answer is three hours. Four hours if it's a Bethesda game, because creating a character in a Bethesda game is like rewinding the Raiders Of The Lost Ark face-melting scene while shooting at your TV with Homer Simpson's Make-Up Gun. It takes patience to extract beauty or even just plain inoffensiveness from the Creation Engine's sticky coils.

Hang on, why am I being mean to Bethesda? I should be directing my snide remarks at Capcom. It turns out the scalliwags want you to pay a small fee to edit your Monster Hunter Wilds character's voice, face and body structure more than once - so if you're buying today, you might want to spend a few more hours perfecting that Hunter physique at start-up.

All this comes care of VGC, who've spotted a Monster Hunter Wilds - Character Edit Voucher: Three-Voucher Pack on Steam, currently priced at £[website], €[website] or $[website] Each voucher lets you "redo your character creation and debut a new look". The base game includes access to one of these vouchers for free. There's a similar DLC voucher pack for your Palico, a catlike helper that accompanies you through the wastes.

In the grand scheme of nickel-and-diming I wouldn't call this abysmal, because I seldom feel the need to fundamentally redesign my character more than once. My current Monster Hunter Wilds character looks like an ailing prog rock musician, and I'm confident that's a vibe that'll carry me to the credits. Besides which, you can still give your Hunter a cosmetic makeover without handing over your lunch money to Capcom: the base game lets you "edit hair, eyebrow color, facial hair, makeup and clothing from the Appearance Menu in tent without using a voucher".

Still, it's a bit cheeky. A reminder that somewhere above the artwork you're enjoying sit a bunch of salivating men in bow ties and tophats, holding comically oversized knives and forks.

Capcom have form for this kind of thing. Dragon's Dogma 2 came garlanded with 21 pieces of DLC at launch, offering optional paid access to items used for fast travel, self-revival and hiring allies. It's more thematically appropriate to Monster Hunter, perhaps, in that Monster Hunter is a game about carving things up into sellable commodities and raw materials. Wilds has been on sale for a few hours and already has 40 items of DLC - I'd say they're flogging every part of the pig except the squeal, but there's probably a Squeal Voucher in the works.

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Company of Heroes 3 is free to try and 50% off, so it's the best time to check out the beefy 2.0 overhaul

I wouldn't normally consider invading Italy as part of my weekend plans. Putting aside the legal and ethical concerns, it also seems like an expensive endeavour. But there's a rare opportunity to kick some fascists out of Europe's boot for the reasonable price of nothing this weekend, as Relic's World War 2 RTS business of Heroes 3 is completely free until Monday.

This gives you time to play a good chunk of the game's ostensibly free-form Italian campaign, where you order companies across the Italian peninsula to engage the Wehrmacht in both scripted battles and semi-random skirmishes. Alternatively, you could probably chew through the entirety of its more traditional North African campaign, with time left over to dabble in the Italian campaign afterwards.

The latter was one of the weaker elements of enterprise of Heroes 3 on launch, as PCG's online editor Fraser Brown explained in his review, referring to it as "a bit of a dud". But the free weekend lands hot on the heels of a massive [website] anniversary modification which makes "considerable changes" to the experience.

The patch reworks most of the Italian campaign's companies to emphasise their specialist roles on the map, increases the variety of playable skirmishes with both new and existing maps adjusted to facilitate larger battles, and makes a wide array of adjustments to units costs, abilities, and recruitment times to improve the balance and pacing of the whole endeavour.

The [website] revision also makes extensive adjustments elsewhere, introducing an array of maps that include returning favourites like Angoville, brand new maps like Crossing in the Woods, and community-made battlefields such as Djebel Pass. There's a long list of tweaks to CoH 3's multiplayer, affecting everything from broader faction behaviours to the traits of specific units and structures. And of course, there's a bucketful of bug fixes too.

The changes seem to have gone down well with the game's community. Recent Steam reviews have notched up a 'Mostly Positive' rating, with reviewers saying Relic has "turned it around" with the game having "evolved into a worthy followup" to firm of Heroes 2. "This was a complete dumpster fire at launch," writes user HOW'DITGETBURND. "But it appears Relic have pulled off a miraculous recovery and fixed this with the [website] improvement."

Hopefully this is the first sign of a revival in Relic's fortunes, as the RTS specialist has endured a rough period in the wake of firm of Heroes 3's launch. This culminated in it parting ways with former owners SEGA and "returning to its roots as an independent creative studio", albeit with the aid of an investment firm.

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In any case, enterprise of Heroes 3 is free until March 10. The base game is also 50% off until Thursday, so if you find its overhauled multiplayer and twin campaigns to your liking, you can grab the full experience at a deep discount.

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