Tempest Rising and Broken Arrow are spearheading a comeback for old-style RTS games. Elsewhere, the boomer shooter is still going strong thanks to Selaco, Boltgun, and Ultrakill. But if we're reviving all these classic genres, then what about the erstwhile six-degrees-of-freedom, or 6DOF game? Forsaken is maybe the best-ed example. But there's also Descent, Terracide, and the still-gorgeous Adrenix, bygone icons of PC's past. Mixing the core mechanics of those historic shooters with a space dogfighting setup akin to No Man's Sky and Elite Dangerous, The Waking Ashes is a new FPS you can sample very soon.
If you're not familiar with 6DOF games, they're essentially a subsection of first-person shooters. Typically, instead of a person with a gun, you're the pilot of a mech or a spacecraft, and rather than just the X and Y axes, you can roll your perspective a full 360 degrees in any direction. Imagine an The Waking Ashes looks fantastic.
Part space game, part dark fantasy, you play a "lone entity" called Fate in a war against a malicious, self-replicating AI. While Forsaken, from 1998, is definitely a visual reference, The Waking Ashes almost reminds me of Sorath's superb roguelike shooters Devil Daggers and Hyper Demon.
Created by Dan Carey Bailey, The Waking Ashes boasts some seriously thumping sound work. Enemy turrets and lifeforms screech past your reticule. Guns produce a terrifying, deep thud, thud, thudding, as though they're so loud, they're somehow audible in the vacuum of space. From what I've seen so far, The Waking Ashes feels like a frantic, sci-fi nightmare, a kind of darker, bleaker version of Elite Dangerous' combat sections.
There's no release date yet, but a demo for The Waking Ashes is coming towards the end of the second quarter of 2025, so look for that around June. Until then, you can wishlist The Waking Ashes on Steam right now.
Otherwise, try some of the best horror games on PC.
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