River City Girls is free on Epic

Monday, Team Ninja is addressing the Rise of the Ronin problems, and inZOI hits 1 million players in only a few days. Tuesday, Another Crab’s Treasure got a free update, Marvel Rivals survived to a second season, which is more than can be said of Concord, and Neko Bakery is out now on Switch. Wednesday, Elden Ring Nightreign has a new character announced. Thursday, apparently people can fund Star Citizen like it’s a government but I can’t get another proper Burnout. And last Friday I covered the Prime Gaming stuff for April, if you missed that.

Moving on to the Epic Games Store, you can pick up some tripe this week. We’ll start with Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms for the simple reason that I don’t want to talk about it twice. I like D&D stuff, I really like Baldur’s Gate 3 (so much that I call it Baldur’s Gay 3), and I quite like a certain rogueish vampire from said game. However, even that won’t convince me that the “Astarion’s Champions of Renown” Pack is worth playing an idle game where you sometimes click on stuff. Especially under some illusion that it is worth more than $100.

If that’s not enough, you can also pick up Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms on the Epic Games Store’s mobile app, which needs to be updated separately every time you open it. Shut up, I’m not annoyed that this is the 4th or 5th time that’s happened in as many weeks. So if you want to waste your time even further with a free-to-play game that has basic gameplay elements that you need to buy individually most of the time and is supposedly worth more than $100, then go wild.

The other free-to-play thing that is supposedly part of this week’s free offerings is 2023’s Arcadegeddon, which was announced at least three years ago and only just came to Epic. A bit less egregious with its jangling keys of “valued at X price we made up so we can repeatedly charge you for this,” you can get 5,000 of in-game currency Arcoins for just logging in. I mean, you probably won’t as it’s one of those magenta-colored multiplayer shooters that does so much original that if we did a blind test of names, I’d have called this one Valorant.

Ok now that I’ve confirmed that I’ll be beaten to death with sticks by the children who play these games when I go outside, the Epic Games Store mobile app also has a second offering that isn’t too bad. It isn’t too good either, but it’s not bad because it actually makes sense for a mobile game. Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead is one of those games where you build a bridge after Rick blew it up and wibbly-wobble, timey-wimey stuff happens because of spoilers for a spin-off series a couple of years later. Build bridges, that’s all it is.

The third and final game for this week on the Epic Games Store for PC (thank Jésus), is River City Girls, a 2019 beat ’em up. A spin-off of a spin-off that’s sort of come back around and all shapes of confusion, Japanese developed Konio-Kun (localized in English as “River City” for some reason) was an arcade beat ’em up that became Nintendo World Cup, then back to fighting, proper football (“soccer”), dodgeball, and eventually back around to this, a colorful beat ’em up with young women in floaty skirts. If you like beat ’em ups, River City Girls is certainly one of them.

All this week you can pick up Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, Arcadegeddon, and River City Girls on the Epic Games Store for PC, with Idle Champions and Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead being available on the mobile app until Thursday, the 17th of April. On to next week and I’ll be about as excited to talk about Firestone Online Idle RPG as I have been about Idle Champions, and Botanicula isn’t going to ease that pain either.