As 2026 looms, Julian’s list of most anticipated games leans into towering machines, orbital warfare, and city-sized roguelites. The selections stay anchored to titles confirmed for release next year, with one notable exception that sits outside the window. Across the roster, the throughline is a preference for scale, spectacle, and fresh twists on familiar genres, all presented with a measured eye toward what actually ships in 2026.
Among the lineup, Total War: Warhammer 40,000 stands out for fans hoping to push the strategy series beyond its traditional boundaries. The pitch centers on a blend of ground combat with an orbital layer that could blur the line between the world map and the battlefield. Early material hints that orbital units might thin the walls between planning and execution, letting spaceborne elements influence real-time engagements. It’s worth noting, however, that this title is the least likely to land in 2026, with a release window that remains uncertain at this stage.
Ace Combat 8 is highlighted for its visually convincing aerial action and a control scheme that remains approachable on a gamepad. The series’ strength has long been its crisp flight visuals and taut arcade-style combat, but the new entry is expected to broaden the experience beyond cockpit maneuvers to include more outside-the-jet management and narrative moments. There’s even speculation of a Persona-like social layer that could let players spend time with their squad between missions, though the final shape of that content remains to be seen and may settle into cutscenes and story beats rather than a robust social system.
Castle Come and Wanderburg present two city-focused roguelites built around moving, modular war machines and sprawling, siege-ready tableaux. In Castle Come, players pilot a drone that can resurrect dead mechs and assemble them into a larger walker, gradually forming a settlement-sized machine crew that fights in turn-based battles. Each defeated foe can be broken down and absorbed into the victorious machine, a mechanic that promises emergent, scale-twisting play. Wanderburg envisions a similar appetite for unaided expansion: a small suburb that crawls across the landscape, gobbling up sheep, trees, and towns until it becomes a fortress bristling with cannons, wizard towers, and battering rams. Both titles aim for roguelite rhythms, and while they may not deliver deep, long-term systems, they offer a high-concept premise that suits quick, binge-friendly sessions.
Garbage Country blends rugged off-road exploration with tower defense against robot incursions, all set against a surprisingly tranquil backdrop. The project is led by Thomas van den Berg, known for Kingdom: New Lands, and aims to fuse a peaceful exploratory vibe with strategic battles against an advancing mechanical threat. PVKK: Planetenverteidigungskanonenkommandant shifts away from resource gathering toward operating an orbital cannon and navigating a subtler subtext published through its trailer, hinting that there may be more going on behind the scenes than straightforward gunnery. The trailer suggests there are political and bureaucratic tensions at play, not just targets to be eliminated, which could add an extra narrative layer to the turret-based action. In the same orbit of energy, Iron Nest: Heavy Turret Simulator is noted as a quick companion title, a turret-focused experience that shares PVKK’s appetite for controlling enormous weapons systems from above.
There is an outlier in the 2026 window: The Free Shepherd, a title that is planned to release in 2027. The organizer’s list explicitly marks this as a step outside the year, but it sits alongside the rest as part of the broader horizon of planned mechs, towers, and military playgrounds. The inclusion of this title reflects the year’s ferment around large-scale, speculative combat, even if its ship date extends beyond 2026.
Taken as a whole, the lineup underscores a taste for spectacle and scale: games that imagine megastructures, roving cities, and orbiting arsenals as the new frontier of entertainment. While not all entries will land on the exact date hoped, they collectively sketch a year where strategy, aerial combat, and turret-led warfare collide with roguelite rhythms and narrative ambitions. For fans of big machines and big ideas, 2026 looks primed to deliver a roster that’s as diverse as it is ambitious.