Hooded Horse, a PC video game publisher that rose to fame earlier this year for backing real-time strategy (RTS) game hit Manor Lords, will release another excellent game into early access next week. The game in question is Cataclismo, the latest effort from Moonlighter and The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story developer Digital Sun Games. It mixes real-time strategy and tower defense mechanics, and players have a lot of freedom in terms of how they build up the defense around their bases in order to ward off the “horrors” that attack them each night.
Although Cataclismo will still be in early access when it launches next week, fans of the RTS genre, base-building games, and tower defense titles will want to keep their eye on Hooded Horse’s latest. With Manor Lords and Cataclismo, Hooded Horse is cementing itself as the PC game publisher to watch.
Cataclismo follows some of the last vestiges of humanity after the titular event corrupted much of humanity and turned them into vicious horrors. Lady Iris is on a quest to find a MacGuffin called the Atla Perl and must fight off horrors each night as her crew hops from citadel to citadel in search of it. From a gameplay perspective, this all plays out through RTS mechanics reminiscent of titles like Age of Empires, albeit with systems that place a greater emphasis on tower defense and base building.
Players will instantly fail missions if Iris is killed or the central building in their fortress falls, so it is up to players to build ample defense and deftly command combat units to ensure that does not happen. During the daytime, I have to build structures within the confines of my citadel to spawn new units and collect important resources like wood, stone, and oxygen. Building up my citadel’s defense was equally important, and the game let me put up a wall, stone brick by stone brick.
Although I’m definitely not the best at creating pretty-looking structures, I appreciate the modularity of its base-building mechanics. It has even more depth than something like Minecraft Legends, which is based on a franchise all about building. Gathering resources and building all of those things took up all of the limited time I had each day, and at night, I then had to defend against the horrors.
Proper base-building during the day is essential to surviving the night, but it’s also possible to command units, most of which use ranged attacks early on, individually, to be effective during combat. Even on medium difficulty, I found Cataclismo tough early on, as these horrors do a fantastic job of discovering the smallest weak points in my defense that I had overlooked. From there, it becomes a more active, combat-focused RTS as I do all I can to prevent them from destroying the central building in my base before the night ends.
I repeat that cycle over the course of several in-game days as I complete other level-specific main and bonus objectives. In that time, Cataclismo quickly asserted itself as an entertaining RTS that always kept me on my toes as I balanced base design, fortifying my base properly, and fighting off hordes of enemies.
On top of all that in the main campaign, Cataclismo already has several modes and gameplay systems in place to ensure its longevity. Steam Workshop support is built right into its building menu, so players will be able to import blueprints for community-made creations. Endless and Skirmish modes allow players to test their base building and defense skills in different contexts, and a level editor mode already gives players all the needed tools to create their own scenarios. This feels a bit more complete and engaging than many other early access titles, including Manor Lords, so I can’t wait to see how this RTS evolves even more over time.
Cataclismo will enter early access on Steam on July 22. According to the early access details on its Steam page, Digital Sun Games and Hooded Horse plan on keeping Cataclismo in early access “for around a year.”
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.