Kaiju Wars

Very few games so expertly combine charm and skill into one package. Kaiju Wars does exactly that and then some. A true love letter to the movies featuring gigantic, destructive monsters, Kaiju Wars does everything right from the moment you start the game and see the many screens depicting various scenes from classic black-and-white kaiju films, setting players up for what's to come. Strategy games tend to have a difficult time bringing in new players because they need to have control over a wide range of minor details, which can be overwhelming. Kaiju Wars introduces its mechanics slowly and in a way that's easy to understand, and once players get a firm grasp on how things work, it soars to new heights.

You start out as a brute simply throwing everything you have at the kaiju, but there comes a point where the strength and number of your units aren't enough. The kaiju are immensely powerful, and the game does a perfect job of mimicking the movies it idolizes and making you earn every victory against these behemoths. You have "projects" you can deploy, which are cards you can use every turn to sway the battle in your favor, like boosting a unit, slowing down monsters, or building more structures. But a mysterious force also has "dark projects" it can use against you that can throw your best-laid plans into total disarray. Even after a loss, players learn how to refine their methods to win next time, and once skill meets the ability to adapt to whatever is thrown at the player, hours of sheer strategic bliss are sure to follow. The games visuals are gorgeous, with the main campaign structured like a comic book. This lets players follow a central set of missions (including challenging, optional side missions) while throwing in a fun cast of lovable characters all trying to get to the bottom of the mysteries surrounding the kaiju. These missions are occasionally broken up with news reports featuring real actors, detailing the world's varied, often funny, reactions to the kaiju menace. Even the sense of progression from the beginning of the campaign to the end is paced brilliantly with the kaiju constantly evolving to expand the player's strategies against them, the design of the levels always changing, and the growing number and variety of projects you unlock and utilize along the way. Kaiju Wars is a game not unlike an actual kaiju threat: it's one thing to hear about it and potentially shrug it off, but once it makes itself known, it's a beast unlike anything you've ever experienced.