DEMO DIVE #2 - May 2026
- Hubert Spala
- 10 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Sunday! It’s rainy, it’s cold, it’s the most frigid May I have lived through if my living memory serves. Well, that only means it is perfect weather for staying indoors with a giant cup of tea and games on my rig to play! Glory be to feasible excuses for entertainment purposes. And since it is a glorious Sunday, it means DEMO DIVE (as is tradition) – and I have a trio of particularly strong titles to share my initial impression of. Let’s roll!
TOPDECK AUTOMAT
From the creator of RACK AND SLAY comes a spanking new auto battler deck builder! And it is hella good time. I think the thing that impressed me the most was the challenge level. Maybe I am just bad at this type of game, maybe the brute uncaring of the RNG didn’t bless me properly but runs at the Normal difficulty never ended well for me. Fortunately, there are a bunch of lower tier challenges to bite into and get the feeling of the game to learn its ropes!
The whole fun of the TOPDECK AUTOMAT is excellent control of crafting your deck with multiple overlapping features that make it feel so decision driven. Cards can be easily upgraded, relics offer variety of passive bonuses, everything interacts and weaves with each other to create a very streamlined synergy-finding core loop. In human language – it’s fun as heck. Even in the demo limited scope you can experiment with variety of builds. Go maximum healing with powerful heal oriented triggers for damage, outlast your opponents in a storm? Sure. Stack on big shields to bounce enemies off? No problem. How about going into maximum Haste and Slow to do like 5-6 actions before an opponent can lay down a single one upon your metal body? Check. Going into pure damage race is also an option – hit fast, hit hard.
TOPDECK AUTOMAT has clear mechanics, great systems under the hood – like card weight, for example, or variety of statuses to play around – and an execution hard focused on gameplay first formula. And the whole key thing that the deck plays itself is a fun little twist, making all your decisions to be focused on providing your battle mech with a tight deck of strong cards and combos to execute without fail.
PARTICULITIX
Whoa this thing is crazy! I remember ye olde times, when I was so much younger and my eyes encountered the visual fiesta of GEOMETRY WARS. It was an important moment in my development as a gamer – I was, after all, a late teenager back then and was like many under the insidious influence of ‘graphic fidelity equals good game’ ideology. That game changed my perception – you can have simplistic visuals that still go hard and provide an extremely adrenaline inducing experience!
PARTICULITIX brings back memories of that time, even though its name is impossible to remember and even harder to write down without mentally shortening it to PARTICULIX, I am sorry. It is a twin-stick shooter with a bunch of clever ideas. First, everything is particles – but it is not merely visual flair, as each particle on an enemy is also an indicator of its health and status. Experience points you gather from them is also just dust you collect. Weapons, mines, explosions, everything is swirling, radiant dots on a dark screen and it creates a sort of eye-poisoning, hypnotic trancelike vision. It’s great!
But that’s not where the good stuff ends. The game has a lot of styles to its core flow. Variety of zones litter the tight arena, providing different bonuses. Improved rate of fire, boosted damage, passive farming on experience… And those zones can move around the arena too! It’s a fun chase to keep track of swarms of enemies while reaping most benefits from those zones. There is a robust upgrading system for abilities and weaponry and a lovely cybersensual voice telling me each time I upgrade some short fancy line to tingle my cortex. It’s dynamic, it’s unique, it’s fast and relentless. Great game in the making.
CLOUDBREAKER
I am never sure if I should write about a Demo that evidently broke on me – or so it feels. But ultimately CLOUDBREAKER left good enough of an impression that I decided to overlook the little hiccup and bring it to your attention anyway! It is a shoot’em up bullet heaven – a survivor-like, if you prefer. I know, I know, the genre is vast and rich in peers, so what made this one jump out and make me like it?
Meta Progression. See, lots of games in this genre have that – a lovely way to ground the grind, to give some sense of purpose for the repetitive run. CLOUDBREAKER, however, makes it feel so organic, so robust, so well thought out that it managed to impress me. It’s not just a menu to check off a list of boxes that gives incremental bonuses. I mean… okay, it is, but it’s very swanky, immersive and well put together. Because it is our Hangar, our fabricator bay, in which we can unlock new tech, relics, upgrades via investing our farmed resource – one with the silly name, Bloil – to do all the good stuff that makes us incrementally stronger in every way. And the demo doesn’t hide anything behind the curtain, you can see the heft of its variety on display here, all the goodies you can unlock and kit out your flying rigs. The siren calls of unlocking new stuff are strong here, and I crave that rush.
The weaponry and the whole ‘build your flying ship from parts’ bit both feel very fine indeed! Limited space on every rig makes sure you cannot just cram everything in and call it a day. You’ll have to make decision about how much space you can feasibly keep for armament and what needs to be left behind for powerful relics, passive modules and boosters. It’s neat and works well. A small thing that felt great was that on-the-fly upgrades for your weapons rarely are just mundane Number Go Up modifier – upgrades nearly always change behavior of weapons, adding extra swing, explosions, arcing chains, knockback or plethora of other effects, making each upgrade feels impactful and fun.
So what that midway through a level enemies stopped spawning? I am sure it’s just a little bug that will be cleaned up with final release. Or so I hope!
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