Four Weekend Playtests Worth Your Steam Wishlist

I signed up for as many weekend playtests as I could get into. Some of them I bounced off immediately. This is not a roundup of everything I touched. These are the ones that earned another session and, in three cases, a wishlist slot.

1. Monster Fantasy

Developer: Jotoyo,Platform: PC (Steam); consoles planned,Status: September playtest; public demo targeted for spring 2027, full release aimed at summer 2027

This one is not my usual lane, and I still came away impressed. Jotoyo’s Monster Fantasy is an action RPG with life-sim systems layered on top: hunt giant monsters in the Kingdom of Eldoras, then go home and chop wood, mine, fish, cook, and craft. The look is the hook. Player characters are chibi and Nintendo-adjacent; the biomes around them are detailed and grounded — hills, desert, vertical volcanic rock. It reads like Monster Hunter and Animal Crossing sharing a save file, which is exactly how IGN previewed the early build earlier this year.

There are four classes in the current build Warrior, Mage, Archer, and Martial Artist/Swordsman, and you swap them by swapping weapons, even mid-fight. The studio has talked about a possible fifth class before launch, plus monster taming, recruitable villagers, and the option to lean hard into combat or skip a lot of it and live in the village. It is not an MMO, even if the loop scratches a similar itch. I went looking for an anime-styled RPG I could wander around in. This one delivered.

Watch for: the September playtest and the delayed Kickstarter. Jotoyo pushed both so players can actually touch the hybrid loop before the studio asks for money.

1. Gallipoli

Developer/publisher: BlackMill Games | Platforms: PC, PS5, Xbox, Status: launched August 20, 2026

This is the fourth game in BlackMill’s WW1 series after Verdun, Tannenberg, and Isonzo, and it is the first to leave the European fronts for the Ottoman ones. You fight as the British Empire or the Ottoman Empire in 25v25 Expedition matches, objective-and-momentum battles, not deathmatch. Launch maps include Anzac Cove, V Beach / Cape Helles, Ctesiphon, Kut al-Amara, and Suez.

It is difficult in a way I enjoyed. Rifles kill in one shot. Reloads are slow and weighted. You do not sprint a room and clear it. There are ten historical classes, and several of them are capped so a team cannot stack the same role. Officer, Rifleman, Engineer, Light and Heavy Machine Gunner, Bomber, Spotter, Sniper, Ammo Bearer — and yes, Stretcher Bearer, the medic who carries syringes and crates and exists to drag people back into the fight. Click the class you want early or someone else will.

If your muscle memory is Call of Duty slide-canceling and bunny hopping, this will feel hostile on purpose. That is the point. I am staying in this one.

1. Time Takers

Developer: Mistil Games | Publisher: NC, Platforms: PC now; consoles planned later in 2026 | Status: global Steam playtest Sept. 4–7, 2026; F2P planned

Hero shooters in the Valorant mold are usually not for me. Time Takers got me anyway.

It is a third-person team survival shooter built around 3v3v3v3: twelve players, four squads of three, last team standing. You pick a Traveler, characters yanked from different eras, from a feudal samurai to a spacesuited monkey, then build during the match with mid-round upgrades. There are no locked classes. The real resource is Time Energy. It is your health, your fuel for abilities, and something you can donate to a teammate who is about to blink out. That single idea is what separates it from another ability-shooter clone.

The first game was awkward. After that, the 3v3v3v3 chaos and the “spend time or share it” decisions clicked. I will stream this for sure. It also made its way onto my wishlist.

Watch for: the current 72-hour Steam playtest (Sept. 4 at 10 a.m. PT through Sept. 7 at 10 a.m. PT). Prior CBT players were auto-whitelisted.

1. Waste the Fallen

Developer/publisher: Royal Crow | Platform: PC, Status: closed alpha Sept. 4–8, 2026 (North America)

I never locked into Once Human. Extraction shooters as a category are over-served and often interchangeable. Waste the Fallen is the first one in a while that kept me in the chair.

Royal Crow, the South Korean studio behind Sudden Attack and CROWZ, has built a Lovecraftian extraction FPS. You drop into “the Deep” solo or in a squad of three as a Deviant, loot ruined zones, fight the Fallen and extract before the place eats you. Other players are in the same instance hunting the same loot. PvP is not a rumor and not a toggle the marketing department is shy about. That is the cleanest way I can put the pitch: Lovecraft had a baby with Arc Raiders, except this one is honest about player-versus-player, unlike Arc.

The map language is doing a lot of work. Giants walk the horizon. Mini-boss pockets sit off the main path. Each match has a main boss fight. Abilities come off the Bio-Arm, the prosthetic every Deviant wears, and there is a Sanity system so the horror is not just silhouette work. Royal Crow’s stated design goal is an extraction shooter that does not delete your weekend for one bad raid: oversized safebox, fast crafting, hideout upgrades between runs.

As of writing this, I have extracted about 30 times and died three. I also owe an apology to every trio we wiped. This is going on the wishlist 100%.