Taking turns is lovely. Twitchy action is lovely as well. Funktronic Labs' upcoming PC adventure Nova-111 combines turn-based and real-time gameplay into an incredibly intriguing, double-lovely thing.
Once upon a spacetime, there existed a team of intelligent scientists, who were living in a turn-based world. They were interested in expediting their scientific research, and thus began developing the "Chronova Device" that will unlock the universal "real-time". All was fine and dandy, that is, until one day a science experiment went horribly wrong, and as a result created a cosmic real-time/turn-based time-vortex which mashed the two unlikely worlds together. You pilot the "Nova-111" starship, a harmless research vessel which was improvised for rescue and survival in hostile environments.
What an interesting concept. It's almost a roguelike, with the player's ship and its enemies moving one square at a time simultaneously, only the player can harness special powers to break out of the turn-based rule set. That's rather tricky.
Funktronic Labs, a studio founded by ex-members of the Pixeljunk team at Q-Games, plans on releasing Nova-111 later this year for PC, Mac and Linux.