The early spring insanity of 2014 has passed, but the summer gaming lull isn’t upon us just yet. In fact, May and June has me very busy in terms of game reviews. Sadly, it doesn’t have me very busy for strategy guide reviews.

According to GameStop, only two upcoming strategy guides have been announced, and both are by Prima Games: Watch_Dogs strategy guide and Mario Kart 8 strategy guide. BradyGames lists nothing new coming in either GameStop, Amazon, or on their Facebook page. I’m honestly surprised by this.

I’m going to be playing these games regardless, but I’d love it if I had some strategy guides to go along with the experience, partly for this site and partly because I just like having strategy guides. I’m always looking for reasons to buy new bookshelves.

• Bound by Flame – Bound by Flame is an action-RPG that features a fire-demon possessed protagonist. Players can control how much of the demon they will let control their character, which in turn alters the powers and the appearance of the hero. I want a strategy guide for this because I just like having strategy guides for RPGs. I have a tendency to get stuck and I obsess over whether I’m missing out on side quests.
• Wolfenstein: The New Order – Okay okay, I probably won’t need a strategy guide for a shooter. It’s typically not that hard to figure out where to go in shooters, as they’re often linear and the point is to kill everyone. My reasoning here is two-fold: 1) nostalgia purposes and 2) you play the game using stealth or mayhem. What if I want to play all stealthy and I need help (as I most likely will since I suck at stealth)?
• Murdered: Soul Suspect – It’s a murder mystery. We all know I’m going to get stuck at least once, and I know I won’t be alone.
• Transformers: Rise of the Dark Spark – I have both of the other Cybertron strategy guides, so yes, I want a guide for this one so my shelf can be complete.

Since most of these games will be available on last generation as well as new generation, the question of install base size is not relevant here.

Of all of these games, I really thought at least one of them would have an announcement for a strategy guide. While I have seen sneak announcements for guides in the past, I’m not counting on that this time around.

Well, I suppose I can do many backlog strategy guide reviews this summer instead. I know everyone is dying to finally hear what I think of the Dragon Age: Origins strategy guide, right?