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Here it is! Our most anticipated games of 2019! These are all the games that are fit to make you say “This is a video game, and the current year is 2019.”

Breach: 0:21

This is one of my personal favorites of the bunch. Self-described as an “ARPG with a twist”, Breach combines 3rd person action games like Blade and Soul with stage-based dungeon crawling like in Closers. The major twist for this one is that it also borrows elements from 1 vs All style PVP games like Evolve or Friday the 13th. One player, or a bot, can become what is known as the Veil Demon. This works like a dungeon master, using traps, walls, spells, and even playing as the monsters themselves to try and kill off the team of four players currently running the dungeon. It has a super dope blend of sci-fi and fantasy aesthetics, and most of the build options for a character are controlled with different items in addition to leveling. Honestly, the interface looks a bit like it’s ripping off Overwatch’s UI, but it could very well change in the future.

Torchlight Frontiers: 1:17

This is the top of the whole pile for me, bar none. Torchlight Frontiers looks to take the much-loved gameplay of Torchlight I & II and combine them with a persistent and shared world, much like Path of Exile. Torchlight has always had a fantastic visual style, and Frontiers is no different. Beautiful, sprawling landscapes explode with brightly colored foliage and even shinier spell effects. An expanded, more varied skill tree allows players to buy and upgrade skills in any order they want, with increasing costs to allow for more customization. There’s also the new Relic weapons that have cool effects and moves when activated and can continually be upgraded and changed. If you’re a fan of Torchlight, Diablo, or any ARPG for that matter, this is one you won’t want to miss.

Kurtzpel: 2:11

This is another one of those Closers-style brawlers with instanced stages and ridiculous anime boobs galore. The focus on tighter, more responsive 3D gameplay with a targeting reticle that requires precise aim of skills and attacks means that Kurtzpel is a game that will be focused on player skill at its very core. This game has only received some closed, limited global alpha tests thus. If our history with Korean MMOs is anything to judge by, I worry the game might be limited with a stamina system or a ton of convenience microtransactions, but since I haven’t played it yet, so I cannot say for sure. Even still, it looks like a blast and I cannot wait to (hopefully) try it this year.

Vainglory PC: 2:57

For those who don’t know, Vainglory was a MOBA for mobile devices that just became available in alpha on PC at time of writing. It’s a standard MOBA with some cool characters and a sizable competitive scene. I’ve downloaded the alpha and plan to do a first look at the game soon. If you’ve played games like League of Legends, then you already know how Vainglory works as a game, but its big draw is not only its portability, but also that it will be fully cross-platform with the PC version. A concern I have though is that the thing that made Vainglory work so well and helped it to become so popular was that it was a PC quality MOBA on a portable platform. Now that it’s stepping into the PC space, where options like League of Legends and DotA 2 exist, will it be able to hold its own? I hope so, as It is quite a lot of fun to play, and I feel like the game could get even better with the Nintendo-Switch like quality of being able to swap from playing on mobile to playing on your PC with one account.

Lost Ark: 3:59

Another standout from the ARPG scene, Lost Ark looks to bring a more cinematic look and feel to the genre with its bright colors, high detail, and silky-smooth animations as its biggest appeal. Focusing on a blend of magic and technology akin to the world of Final Fantasy VI, the game looks to bring a new type of setting to the world of traditional top-down ARPGS. Another big selling point is the combo-oriented gameplay. Rather than focus on one major skill, as is the case with most big-name ARPGS, Lost Ark has a combo system that provides players benefits for chaining skills together. Also, this game has magical mini-guns, and that’s just plain awesome. There are a bunch of classes to choose from, some of which are rarely seen in the ARPG genre like Bards or the heavy artillery cannon-using Blaster class.

Ashes of Creation: 4:54

Ashes of Creation is a huge open-world MMORPG that boasts players can write the story of their own server through constructing its world with their Node system. You can start with one of the game’s eight different character archetypes, a second one while leveling, and are given a weapon that you can build and spec into that will grow as you do. Ashes also promises a strategic combat system that blends the best elements of both an active real-time combat system with traditional tab-targeting systems to present something completely new. Obviously, the biggest thing that developer Intrepid Studios wants you to take away is that your individual choices matter in the shaping of the game’s world and economy. How well the idea holds up in practice remains to be seen, but we’re choosing to be cautiously optimistic about it. Ashes of Creation may have fallen off some people’s radars, but it’s definitely worth hoisting back up there.

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