Julian’s most anticipated games for 2026

While the old saying goes ‘A game in the basket is worth two in Steam Wishlist’, as we teeter into a new year it’s good to highlight a couple of the games shuffling our way. Especially when there are quite so many of them that include big stompy mechs. Some of them as big as cities. My engine oil-starved heart beats and thumps in anticipation.

I’ve tried to keep the list to games confirmed for release next year – tragically cutting The Free Shepherd, which is planned to release in 2027 – but there is one exception.

So let’s begin with the outlier that’s likely to wander tardily into 2027.

Total War: Warhammer 40,000

While I am a fan of Warhammer 40,000, that’s really just the wrapping for what I’m looking forward to in the new Total War. It’s that blend of ground and orbital warfare that could be a properly good upset to the formula.

Traditionally in a Total War game – really, in most strategy games that feature real-time battles – there is a distinct separation between the battles and the world map. You prepare your army in the strategy layer, you pick the place of battle, you do all you can to weight the coming fight in your favour, but then, in the real-time battle the world around the conflict falls away. You deal with the enemy with what you have available on the day.

Orbital units that thin the wall between the battlefield and the world map could breach that separation, allowing you to significantly alter the dynamic on the battlefield once the fight has begun. I’ve no idea how true that will be in practice, or whether it will be a good change for Total War, we only have a brief trailer to gawp at, but I want to find out.

Though, of the games on my list, Total War: Warhammer 40,000 is the least likely to release in 2026.

Ace Combat 8

I’ve never had the resolve to learn to play actual flight simulators. I get excited at the prospect, put aside a Saturday afternoon, and then grow increasingly frustrated as I struggle to get a plane off the runway. Too many times have I simply retracted the landing gear, making my plane sit down on the asphalt as a final act of disobedience with my virtual flying instructor. But I love the games that look like serious simulations and let me play on a gamepad.

The Ace Combat series is chief among the sim lookalikes. Each plane is rendered in incredible detail, looking the part, but crucially operating with a simplicity I can handle. With roots stretching back to a 1993 arcade cabinet, the series’s focus has always been on aerial action over realism. Missions see you downing tens of planes, with the volume of enemies bringing the thrill rather than the challenge of operating a complex plane against a single foe.

Where Ace Combat 8 looks like it may differ from previous games is by expanding your out of the cockpit activities, with more focus on your role as a commander. My hope is that that materialises in a Persona-like social meta game where you can play pool with your wing buddies. In reality, it probably just means a lot of cutscenes.

Castle Come and Wanderburg

Ever since reading Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines books, I’ve been delighted in the idea of cities that move about a landscape. In recent years there have been a bevy of games that capture something of that fascination – Monster Are Coming is the one I’ve covered most recently – but none have yet gripped my attention as I’d hoped.

2026 sees at least two more games contend for my traction city affections.

The first, is Castle Come, a game in which you control a drone that can resurrect dead mechs and Frankenstein them together. Starting with a small gun bot, you cobble and amass your way up to a settlement-sized walker populated by a human crew who operate its weapons and engines in turn-based battles. Every enemy you topple can be broken down and added to your own bulk. Lovely stuff.

The second is Wanderburg, which looks the closest game to Mortal Engines I’ve yet seen. You control a small suburb as it pootles the world gobbling up sheep, trees, and municipalities that get in its way. As you gorge on the landscape’s bounty your small suburb expands into a fortress bristling with cannons, wizard towers, and battering rams. All the better to knock off other castles’ crenellations with.

Both games are roguelites and may lack the depth that would give them the sticking power I’m hoping for, but, well, sometimes all I want is to to become a cannon-wielding NIMBY.

Garbage Country

There is an enticing tension at the heart of Garbage Country. You split your time between driving around a rugged landscape in a beaten up old land rover, viewing the action overhead like the old Micro Machines games, and taking part in tower defense battles against the robots that have taken over the land.

Thomas van den Berg, the creator of Kingdom: New Lands, is leading development of Garbage Country and it has that same unexpected peace in a genre that’s traditionally far from soothing.

PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant

While I’m not willing to learn the basics of a flight simulator, a skill that could feasibly (but hopefully never) come in handy in real life, I’m ready and waiting to master the ins and outs of controlling not one but two fictional gun turrets.

In Bippinbits’ previous game, Dome Keeper, you split your time between mining for resources below your base and operating the gun turret above to fight off waves of incoming monsters. For PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant, it looks like they’ve dropped the whole resource gathering business and instead focused entirely on stimulating the life of an orbital cannon operator. The trailer hints there is a lot more going on than purely gunnery, with suggestions that (shockingly) your authoritarian superiors may not be wholly working to your benefit, but I wouldn’t want to presume any civil disobedience will be called for. If so, I’ll find out what the equivalent of retracting a landing gear is for a massive turret. Presumably pointing its barrel at the ground like a sad salute.

I’ll also make a quick shout-out for Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator, a game inspired by the trailer for PVKK. I’m not one to pin my colours to a single turret simulator flag, I have room enough for two mega cannons in my heart.