The EB Expo trade show was a moment for major developers and publishers, but there were plenty of home-grown titles on offer too.

While titles like Battlefield Hardline, Evolve and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare might have taken top billing among gamers at this year's EB Expo, there were also a handful of local indie developers vying for the interest of the public.

Many developers helped kickstart their careers through the fledgling first titles at similarly small booths at conventions around the world. It's fascinating in many cases to see games from previous conventions return, observing their progress, or the fresh faces and ideas borne out of new graduates from the various colleges and universities around the country.

This year's expo also contained one Australian title notable for its size and international support, but I'll be reviewing Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel later so it won't appear in this roundup. As an added note, One More Line won't be included either due to its appearance in my pick of the expo last week.

Escapes (Jared Hahn, PC/PS4/XB1/Vita, December)

The first Australian indie I sat down to play was Escapes, a puzzler that gives you one or more squares, a maze and uses a string of spikes, teleports, timing challenges and inverted movement to spice up the action.

It took about three seconds before I was immediately reminded of Heaven & Earth, an ancient puzzler from 1992 that combined a card game, a pendulum and a string of puzzles into a bizarrely meditative experience.

One of the most infuriating challenges in that was a series of mouse cursors, which could select and move squares on a grid. The objective was to maneuver the squares to their respective goals while dealing with inverted movements, blocked pathways and your own ineptitude.

Escapes is very much like that, but on a simpler scale with a charming retro look. Only 12 levels were playable in the build I experienced, but it was a great, soothing puzzler that anyone could easily enjoy. Designer Jared Kahn is hoping to have Escapes out by the end of this year for approximately $10.

S.W.A.P (Chaos Theory Games, PC/Mac, out now)

I first encountered S.W.A.P at a Beer & Pixels gig, a Sydney event run by the local chapter of the IDGA to showcase indie and student projects in the relaxed convenience of a bar. It's a multiplayer indirect shooter, as developers Chaos Theory like to call it, even if shooting your enemy is still a core element of the game.

The trick is to shoot your enemy at the right time, since a successful hit results in you swapping bodies. The main game mode is a neat twist on capture the flag, with players required to take a virus back from the centre of the map to their goal. Making a straight beeline at the goal or the virus simply guarantees a free shot for your opponent, forcing players to be clever with their movement.

Graphically the game doesn't look spectacular - a common trait among indie games, where most of them are coded on Unity rather than CryEngine 3 or Unreal Engine 4 - but the concept is solid enough to have gained attention among the wider press. Rock Paper Shotgun, the bastion of PC gaming among British pundits next to PC Gamer, liked S.W.A.P so much they covered it twice, while the developers told me the German media also took a shine to the game.

S.W.A.P is already out now and Chaos Theory is hoping they will gain enough momentum to launch a crowd funding campaign to reskin the entire game using the latest Unreal Engine. Having seen the lightning-fast progress of the new Unreal Tournament, it'd be an absolute blast if S.W.A.P can get the same treatment. However, the Melbourne-made arena shooter Reflex recently shut down its own Kickstarter campaign only 10 days before the end. Hopefully S.W.A.P fares much better.

Metrocide (Flat Earth Games, PC)

There is no limit to the imagination when it comes to games, but there are titles that are well suited to an expo floor and those that most certainly do not. Metrocide's brand of top-down, Syndicate-esque assassinations and 8-bit visuals are great on the eye and the mind, but the old-school control system was something that even the developers admitted perplexed a good portion of the gamers who sat down for a demo.

Your character moves around with the WASD controls, while the mouse controls aiming. But the real quirk is that your character will move in relation to the position of your crosshair, rather than independently of the crosshair. It's not the most user-friendly system, especially in the hustle and bustle of an expo when playtimes are often limited to a few minutes at a time.

Nevertheless, the core concepts are good and the controls are perfectly serviceable with experience. Your job as an assassin, navigating the network of tunnels, cops, CCTV cameras and paranoid targets, is engaging enough, and turning it all into a roguelike is a clever way of making Metrocide more attractive than you'd first expect.

There are some UI quirks that could be made clearer and I wouldn't mind if the view was zoomed out a little further. But on the whole, Metrocide looks neat and plays pretty well. It's set for an Early Access launch later this year, with a full release expected in late 2015 at this stage.

Last Gun X (The Giant Machine, PC/Mac/Windows Phone/Android, late October)

It wasn't until a couple of years ago that a colleague introduced me to the wonders of enjoying games on your smartphone while taking a toilet break at work. I'm not entirely sure why such shenanigans had escaped me, but ever since, I've always looked at mobile games with some consideration to how much they can be enjoyed in short, toilet break-like sessions.

Last Gun, a 1 vs 1 shooter with echoes of Pong, fits the bill perfectly. You select from a catalogue of characters and weapons with varying damage, speed and armour characteristics. You're then thrown into a battle hovering in space as you fire miniguns, rocket launchers and grenades at each other while making best use of the cover provided.

The analog controls are intriguing as well, with two bars controlling the positioning of your character and the direction of your aim. It's a system that results in a lot of prefiring and zoning play, a mechanic immediately familiar to fans of Quake.

What's most impressive about Last Gun was just how professional and the UI looks. It's sharp, modern with a great Mortal Kombat vibe. Last Gun will be free-to-play when it launches later this month and should be a perfect accompaniment for anyone looking for a quick and easy timewaster.

Majestic Nights (Epiphany Games, PC/MAC/iOS/Android)

Majestic Nights, despite being a product of Sydney-based developer Epiphany Games, didn't actually make an appearance at EB Expo. I received a preview build prior to the event, although an updated one that fixed a few jarring issues arrived only days before and as a result I've decided to include it here.

It's an isometric action-adventure based on the 1980s life of Cardhunter, an intelligence operative whose exploits turn out to be a little more famous than he'd like. A source becomes the victim of a professional hit, resulting in your forced escape from an underground base that results in the confirmation of all your conspiracies about the US government. That's about as much as I could glean from the story, since Majestic Nights doesn't offer a great deal in the way of explanation.

The cover and shooting mechanics are pretty simple, but it's also difficult to understand why they're necessary at all. Once you've gone through the rigmarole of crouching through shadows to procure the gun, the rest of the first chapter can basically be beaten by running up to enemies and shooting them point blank. Agents didn't notice my constant jogging and closing down the range seemed to be the only way to guarantee an effective shot.

Majestic Nights, however, is sporting a colourful retro art style that's incredibly easy on the eye. But there's a lot of systems lacking a proper implementation and plenty of polish required. And just how Epiphany plans to get around the current gamer trend of ignoring episodic releases until everything is released is another issue entirely.

Two more chapters of Majestic Nights are due out this year, with the remainder to be released in 2015.

Alex Walker is the regular gaming columnist for ABC Tech + Games. You can follow him on Twitter at @thedippaeffect.