So the twin-stick shooter multiplies the risk to players by having enemies come in from all angles, but as good ludology dictates, the best titles in genre ensure the player is also empowered. Through the game there are multiple pick-ups which add to the power of your blaster; there are also secondary weapons including missiles and even a sword, which have limitless usability, letting you take out vast swarms of robot invaders. It sounds old-fashioned, it looks old-fashioned, but this is smart, gripping game design. After each level, the landscape swirls to reveal a new surface, like some monstrous Rubik's cube, and you're back blasting away. Taking out scenic objects reveals hidden items and routes – there are score multipliers everywhere; the world is utterly alive, fizzing with energy.

Welcome back to Gaming IRL, a monthly segment where several editors talk about what they've been playing in their downtime. Gaming IRL is part of a broader series in which you'll find stories from all of the areas we cover: gadgets we use every day, the apps and services we adore, what we're watching and the music and podcasts we can't live without. Today is all about gaming. E3 is done and dusted for another year, but every year there are dozens of great games released, all of which are available right now. Fittingly, our picks this month range from a 1997 sim all the way up to a game that was released just today.

Developer Housemarque's ode to Robotron: 2048, Nex Machina, finally has a release date: June 20th on both PC and PlayStation 4. And if you were a fan of what you played in the beta but thought it was missing something, maybe that je ne sais quoi was couch-play with a buddy. "Local co-op will allow two players to play side by side, just like in the old school arcade halls, competing or helping each other out," the developer writes on the PlayStation Blog. It's something Housemarque has included in its previous games, sometimes as a post-launch add-on, but here it'll be a part of the experience on day one. Want a preview of how the voxel-based madness will play out next month?

Housemarque, the Finnish developer behind Resogun and Dead Nation, hasn't had the best year. I visited its Helsinki headquarters back in September to see how the studio was following up Resogun, the surprise hit of the PlayStation 4 launch. What I found was a unique company struggling to hold on to the identity it believes in. Housemarque made its name with Stardust. Originally released for the Amiga in the early '90s, the series rose to prominence with the digital release of Super Stardust HD on the PlayStation 3. The studio has since become a specialist in digital-only games, almost all of which can trace their lineage back to the arcade. The isometric shooter Dead Nation was the studio's next big hit, going on to become one of the bestselling digital-only titles for PlayStation 3, while the Ikaruga-meets-Metroid platformer Outland was critically acclaimed. But it was during the launch of the PlayStation 4 that Housemarque would make the biggest impact. Resogun took the basic premise behind the arcade classic Defender and turned it into a modern shooter. With cylindrical stages and a custom voxel-based engine, the game was by far the strongest PlayStation 4 exclusive of its time, and one of scant few highlights of the console's November 2013 launch. Sony clearly knew as much: It made Resogun free to all members of its PlayStation Plus subscription service, and as a result the game was downloaded by millions of PlayStation 4 owners.