Hardcore Gamer recently had the opportunity to get our hands on four titles coming out of Headup Games, a German games publisher best known for their Bridge Constructor series. The games in question were the sci-fi third-person shooter Everreach: Project Eden, the Switch and PlayStation 4 ports of the party-running game Runbow, the undead-slaying tower defense game Hero Defense and a brief glimpse of Trüberbrook, a sci-fi mystery adventure game set in a 1960s parallel universe.

Everreach: Project Eden

Acting as a third-person sci-fi shooter RPG, Everreach: Project Eden looks and feels much like the Mass Effect trilogy. It’s about humanity colonizing new planets and a corporation called Everreach has been at the forefront of settling these. Your character, a commander named Nora, is among the first to land on a newfound planet, but she meets stiff resistance upon landing. The shooting is simple, and again, reminiscent of Mass Effect with ammo counts being shown as a projection just off the guns themselves in real time. The game includes an elaborate skill tree that allows players to fine tune Nora to their play style, whether that be close-quarters combat or long-range shooting.

Though there have been various collaborators, Everreach has primarily been made by a single person – an astounding feat, considering the scope. It's designed to last about eight hours to get through its main story but has upwards of twnety hours worth of additional content. There are also hoverbike segments, dialogue options with NPCs and more to keep things interesting. Everreach: Project Eden is due out sometime this year.

Runbow

Next we had a look at Runbow, a multiplayer platform racing game that’s already hit the PC, Xbox One, New 3DS and Wii U (if you haven’t sent that console off to storage yet). Luckily, it looks like Runbow is about to find a second life on PlayStation 4, and more importantly for this type of game, Nintendo Switch. Runbow is simple: you and up to seven of your closest friends run and jump from platform to platform trying to outlast the rest and reach the finish line first. Every few seconds, however, a new color of the rainbow takes over the background and every platform that shares that color will disappear for the next few seconds. This creates a hectic, engaging rhythm that sets this runner apart from the pack. The mobile nature of the Switch could bring it a new following it hasn’t yet seen. A release date has not been set, but Runbow is planned to hit the PlayStation 4 and Switch sometime within the next few months.

Hero Defense

Here to inject some fresh ideas into the tower defense genre is the brand-new Hero Defense, a game that focuses on five different characters with different attributes and abilities (i.e., they’re all different towers). Each character has an associated color and some enemies match that associated color, meaning it’s best to have that specific character set in a strategic spot to take them out more efficiently than a character of another color. This might seem restricting at first, as only having five characters/towers out at once would make the strategic value go down, but unlike most other tower defense games, these characters can be moved however much you want over the course of a level. They also have their own experience and skill trees, allowing you to upgrade them however you see fit. The story revolves around the main character and his tumultuous relationship with his father, Count Necrosis, who is raising armies of the dead to take over the world. Hero Defense is already out on Steam but is coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in Q2 of 2018.

Trüberbrook

A mystery adventure game set in 1960s Germany, Trüberbrook is being developed by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg, a German company that traditionally focuses on television and film funding. We didn’t get to find out much about its plot or gameplay, but Trüberbrook has one of the most distinct art style’s we’ve ever seen in a game. The team behind the game made model sets, scanned them into the game and have characters move around in these pre-rendered (though totally scalable and rotatable) 3D environments. The whole thing looks like a diorama and we can’t wait to see more. Trüberbrook is coming to PC, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch, though its release date seems a ways off.

For more info on these games and more, keep an eye on Hardcore Gamer.