Wargroove pushed back to early 2019

Chucklefish's turn-based strategy game Wargroove—described by Samuel as a "fiercely competitive Advance Wars successor" after his hands-on last year—will no longer be out this year as planned, and will instead be released in early 2019, the developer has announced.

The delay will "allow us to provide players with a really robust package when the big day comes", Chucklefish said in a blog post.

It also provided a breakdown of all the content it has planned. It's aiming for more than 30 two-player PVP maps, more than 10 three-player maps and at least six four-player maps. You can play them locally against friends, against the CPU, or online, and you'll be able to play through each match live or lock in your turn and return later, allowing you to juggle multiple matches at any one time.

As a reminder, to win a match of Wargroove you have to kill the enemy commander or take over their base. Each commander, of which there are 12, has a unique ability: good boy Caesar can inspire all his units to move again even if they've already spent their turn, for example.

Also planned for the game is an Arcade mode that'll pit you against five opponents in a row on random PvP maps—it'll be a "great way to learn about all of the characters", Chucklefish says. You'll also be able to play a campaign with at least 33 missions, a puzzle mode where you have to defeat the enemy in a single turn (expect 25+ scenarios), and use a creation tool that will let you design your own maps and campaigns.

Expect plenty of cutscenes similar to the one below, which Chucklefish made to explain the delay.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.