Did you enjoy Into the Breach from Subset Games as much as me? Kaiju Wars looks like it will be somewhat similar as another fantastic strategy game with small contained levels.

Mentioned previously in this article back in early January, Kaiju Wars actually now has a Steam page up to follow it on and there's a whole lot more detail on what you will be doing in the game. The idea is that you're playing the military inspured by some retro Kaiju movies as you're hopelessly outclassed. Slow the Kaiju down with tanks, construct buildings to distract them and deploy experimental weapons to buy some more time.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Unlike the gameplay in Into the Breach, you can't kill them. They are pretty much indestructible and your job is just to slow them down and maybe get them to go away for a while. There's five of these monsters and they can mutate to grow stronger but they do become predictable.

What else to expect from it:

Campaign Mode!

• Embark on a Campaign! - Play missions from all over the world as you progress through the varied campaign. Test your wits in tactical puzzles, command dozens of units in large-scale scenarios, and fend off repeated attacks while developing your city economically in city defense missions.
• Defend Famous Cities - Floatio, Istanboom, Uberlin, New Shark City and Bomb Bay are all under attack! Each city has unique experimental weapons, layouts, and economic projects.
• Thwart the Invader - An alien invader (of course there's an alien invader!) is commanding the Kaiju! Be ready for anything - alien black-ops teams are trying to locate our scientists. Natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes may not be so natural.

Create your own battles!

• Create your own City or Scenario - Simple and easy to use, scenarios can be crafted in minutes using the drag and drop map editor
• Share your creations online - Share your Cities or Maps online using Steam Workshop integration
• Compete with other players! - Gain the top spot on the Weekly Challenge leaderboards

I definitely feel like I need this. Sounds awesome.

Follow / wishlist Kaiju Wars on Steam .

Albion Online is the sandbox classless MMO that has Linux support and it's going strong, with another major update announcement that will bring Faction Warfare 2.0.

That's the big headline feature, bringing on the next stage of City Faction Warfare which will give you the ability to control entire regions and a special front-line battle system to encourage fighting. There will also be a big bunch of rewards too, along with powerful Faction Mounts to grab. Also teased is a new Faction with a unique playstyle aimed at advanced players. More map changes to help with this too including the Royal Continent to see an expansion.

Hellgates, the special system where two teams fight through a dungeon engaging in both PvE and PvE will also see a major expansion. It will have an option for 10v10, better graphics, a bunch of new layouts to prevent it getting stale, a new and better matchmaking system, a new rising lava mechanic to prevent one team stalling, new creatures to fight and a dedicated Hellgate Infamy system for rewards and track success. Sounds like Hellgates are going to get awesome.

You can listen to an overview of it in the below video:

Watch video on YouTube.com

What else? Apart from the major features there's also new vegetation graphics coming to bring the world to life a bit more, better tooltips are coming along with a Loadouts feature to quick-equip a selected set of items and loadouts can be shared to other players.

Play Albion Online free on Linux from the official site or Steam .

Pioneer is another classic example of a long-running free and open source game doing well, with a brand new release up that overhauls plenty of important parts.

The Pioneer 2021-02-03 release has been a year in the making and implements their new UI system built on top of the powerful and open source ImGui . They also mentioned vastly improved combat with some aim assist, better trading, you can now actually rotate the camera with the middle mouse button for better camera control and plenty more.

Here's what else is new and you can see just how much went into it:

• New ship: Skipjack Courier from OKB Kaluri ( #4871 )
• New model: Escape pods (initially only to be scooped up, not purchasable) ( #4877 )
• Improve combat targeting by adding aim assist for player weapons ( #5037 )
• Complete overhaul of commodity prices, to be similar to Frontier ( #4831 )
• Redesign System and Sector Map View layouts ( #4852 )
• NewUI is dead, long live PiGui! ( #5032 )
• More lively station traffic control communications ( #4987 )
• Ship-specific atmospheric pressure limits ( #4958 )
• Add surface impact alerts #4891
• Captains log added ( #4795 )
• Show background stars in system view ( #5068 )
• Show surface starports in system view ( #5060 )
• Significantly reduce savefile sizes ( #5075 )
• New BBS advert for soldout commodity ( #5059 )

That's only what they consider to be major, there's a huge amount of smaller fixes and improvements across the whole game including a new unified colour theme and new icons, stars on the map showing up as bigger and brighter depending on their actual size in space, translation improvements and so on.

See more on the official site .

Might and Delight have certainly created some unique experiences, with the Shelter series putting you directly into the shoes of various animals and it's back in Shelter 3.

It's a role-playing game but not one where you're fussing with skills and equipment, instead it's about the rawness of nature itself and animal survival. A game where wisdom, empathy and leadership play an important role in your survival, according to the developer.

"As a new mother you must protect your calf, but you must also take responsibility for the whole herd, protecting old and young from lurking predators and the threat of starvation. What’s more, the matriarch has given you the responsibility of steering the herd to an important destination and difficult choices will need to be made on the way."

Now with an aim to launch at the end of March, Might and Delight have shown off a brand new trailer that you can watch below:

Watch video on YouTube.com

"Landscapes and fauna are rendered in mesmerising patterns and scored with an enchanting soundtrack by Retro Family, conjuring a magical world to lose yourself in. From lynx cubs to elephant families, from the tundra to the jungle, the next Shelter incarnation migrates to new territory, evolving into a new, magical game world and an experience that you won’t forget. "

Looking really good, I'm not sure how much my heart will be able to take when one of the herd dies - it looks so damn sad. Elephants are truly majestic creatures so it's an intriguing animal to focus on. Once we see a confirmed release date we will let you know.

You can wishlist / follow Shelter 3 on Steam .

On a related note Might and Delight are also working on the 'TMORPG' (a tiny online RPG) called Book of Travels, check out some preview gameplay here .

Here's a short and sweet update on the work for Zink, the upcoming OpenGL on top of Vulkan implementation announced by Collabora which has been progressing steadily.

As a quick refresher: Zink is a Mesa Gallium driver that leverages the existing OpenGL implementation in Mesa to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL when only a Vulkan driver is available. More on the why can be found here .

Developer Mike Blumenkrantz has been hacking away at Zink code lately, after announcing back in November 2020 that Valve jumped in to fund more work on it. In a fresh blog post is up where Blumenkrantz mentions the continued sponsorship from Valve, and as a result Zink can now run with NVIDIA GPUs on Linux with the wording "So now zink+nvidia is a thing.". See it in action below:

Once it's ready, it's going to be extremely interesting to see what becomes of it.

Interested in keeping up with the Vulkan driver development on the Raspberry Pi 4? We have a new update for you and an upcoming event you might want to watch.

While the v3dv driver is now part of Mesa and was released along with Mesa 20.3.0 back in December 2020, work has not stopped on it. There was still plenty of areas it could improve upon from features to performance, with developer Alejandro Piñeiro Iglesias writing on their blog about recent work.

Some of what's new includes:

• The following optional 1.0 features were enabled: logicOp, althaToOne, independentBlend, drawIndirectFirstInstance, and shaderStorageImageExtendedFormats.
• Added support for timestamp queries.
• Added implementation for VK_KHR_maintenance1, VK_EXT_private_data, and VK_KHR_display extensions
• Added support for Wayland WSI.

Interestingly it seems more developers are getting involved, as multiple features were hooked up by people not involved in the "core" team of the driver. Now it's in Mesa directly, anyone can get involved.

The driver itself became a conformant Vulkan driver last year but they still had more testing to do to find bugs. As part of this the Order Independent Transparency demo from Sascha Willems is now working too (see Willem's Vulkan stuff here ):

Additionally the FOSDEM 21 event in this weekend and they will be doing a talk on Saturday February 6  at 3PM UTC. The talk will cover the development story and current status of the driver, along with an overview of the design and the challenges of doing it.

Ready to try the next set of upcoming games on Steam? Wait no more, as the Steam Game Festival February 2021 edition is now live with plenty to take a look at.

The event features over 500 demos across multiple genres, plus developer-hosted livestreams and chats. Additionally this time around the event itself will have its own livestream show on the event page and Twitch for the first day featuring a select group of demos.

We'll be gradually going over the list and pointing out / capturing footage of a few that stand out. For now, here's a few that look delightful that offer up a Linux demo for the event:

• Alisa
  • "Alisa is a Horror-themed Action Adventure game and a genuine throwback to the golden age of 90s 3D games."
• Don't Forget Me
  • "A jazz-punk adventure game with a twist, Don’t Forget Me is a new breed of puzzle game. Dive into the memories of your patients, use your own observations to unwrap their minds and uncover a dark conspiracy set to claim dominion over humanity."
• Dwerve
  • "Dwerve is a tower defense dungeon crawler RPG. It tells the story of a young dwarven tinkerer that adventures into dwarven ruins armed with turrets and traps, the only weapons that can protect the dwarves from Witch Queen Vandra the Wicked and her army of bloodthirsty trolls and monstrous creatures."
• Kathy Rain: Director's Cut
  • "Award-winning adventure Kathy Rain returns in the Director’s Cut, featuring an extended story with more puzzles to solve and new areas to explore. Witness the rise of an iconic detective as you uncover a dark and sinister truth hiding behind the calm exterior of a small rural town."
• Loop Hero (no icon but Linux demo is there)
  • "The Lich has thrown the world into a timeless loop and plunged its inhabitants into never ending chaos. Wield an expanding deck of mystical cards to place enemies, buildings, and terrain along each unique expedition loop for the brave hero."
• Loveland
  • "Take on the role of The Detective, a member of an agency tasked with hunting down supernatural and cryptid creatures. Will you be able to uncover the mysteries of Loveland?"
• Luna's Fishing Garden
  • "Luna's Fishing Garden is a cozy fishing and building game. Catch fish, trade it in and create the garden of your dreams by planting new trees, placing water objects and bringing animals to the archipelago."
• One Dreamer
  • "Manipulate the world around you by editing source code in an adventure game about a burnt out indie game developer's quest to fulfill a lifelong dream."
• Viscerafest
  • "Viscerafest is a Sci-Fi Fantasy Singleplayer Arena FPS with minor Collectathon elements. Fight through hordes of aliens and eldritch monstrosities wielding a slew of powerful weapons, juggling your resources, and exploring over 26 intricately designed hand crafted levels."

There's absolutely loads more coming to Linux, a fair amount just don't have a demo (either for Linux or at all). Those are just a bunch that immediately stand out to me and as always it's quite subjective whenever we do a list to tastes. Be sure to give your recommendations in the comments.

It's still a shame that having a demo is no longer a sure thing but it's nice to see them used like this too, as it's a fun bit of marketing for developers and gives us a chance to test and find out about new games we weren't aware of before.  The whole event runs until Tuesday, February 9 at 10AM PST / 6PM UTC.

See the event page here and you can find the entire list of demos available on Steam any time here .

Total War: WARHAMMER III has just been formally announced by SEGA / Creative Assembly and the good news is that porter Feral Interactive have right away confirmed it's being supported on Linux (and macOS).

"The cataclysmic conclusion to the Total War: WARHAMMER trilogy is coming. Rally your forces and step into the Realm of Chaos, a dimension of mind-bending horror where the very fate of the world will be decided. Will you conquer your Daemons… or command them?"

Watch video on YouTube.com

For the Linux release date, usually it's a little while later but in this case it seems Feral may have been pulled in earlier than usual as Creative Assembly noted it will be available "as close to launch day as possible" with the exact date to be confirmed closer to launch which will be this year 2021. They also confirmed that it will be on the Epic Store but this time (like TROY did) it's not going to be exclusive at all.

Once we get more confirmed features and info we will let you know.

You can wishlist / follow on Steam . You can pre-purchase which gives an additional free Race Pack that more details will be given on "soon".

Two big bits of news from Canonical and Ubuntu to cover today and both about the future of the Linux distribution.

Firstly, the sad news to get it out of the way: the current desktop lead for Ubuntu, Martin Wimpress, will be leaving Canonical and moving over to slim.ai . Wimpress wasn't in the role particularly long, taking over from when Will Cooke stepped down in October 2019. However, it's not all sad news. Wimpress will be continuing to lead Ubuntu MATE which is a passion project so you can expect that to continue as normal.

We wish Martin Wimpress all the best and continued success with life and Ubuntu MATE.

Additionally, in related news, it looks like Ubuntu is set to get a new installer. Announced in a post on the official Ubuntu Discourse forum, noting that the current installer dates way back to 2006 which is ancient when you consider how quickly all other parts of Ubuntu (and Linux as a whole) moves on and so it has become "cumbersome" to keep it going.

Interestingly, they're going with the new Flutter UI from Google, which Canonical worked with Google on to get early desktop Linux support hooked up that was announced back in July 2020 .

The original installer will remain (for now) and their plan is to have an initial version ready to test in the Ubuntu 21.10 release due out in October 2021. From there the hope is it becomes the default for the next big LTS (Long-term support) release of Ubuntu 22.04 due in April 2022.

Pictured - a prototype

See the full announcement here .