Red Solstice 2: Survivors, real-time XCOM with multiplayer, hits Steam in June

'Real-time XCOM' is a pretty good pitch, and that's what Red Solstice 2: Survivors seems to promise, as we saw in the Future Games Show. You control a squad of soldiers fighting mutants on Mars, ordering them around in real-time—although it does seem like the action slows down a little when you bring up the command wheel. There's also a co-op mode that lets up to eight players work together, each controlling an individual soldier.

There's a strategy layer too, with technology to research and upgrades for your troops, who can all have different loadouts of weapons, tech, upgrades, and abilities. And you've got six classes to choose from: medic, assault, recon, heavy, demolition, and marksman.

That multiplayer mode sure seems like a big draw. It looks frantic, like you've zoomed-in on a squad of StarCraft marines defending a bunker from a horde of zerglings and then taken individual control of them. Let's hope they have a better survival rate than those marines usually did.

Red Solstice 2: Survivors will be available on Steam from June 17.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.