Tag: tactics

Duelyst
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Duelyst brings collectible card games back down to earth

J.K. Rowling was remarkably creative when coming up with Wizard’s Chess. A favorite pastime of Ron and Harry’s in the early Harry Potter books, wizarding chess is exactly like regular chess, except the pieces move by themselves and smash one another when taking opposing squares. “That’s totally barbaric,” opines Hermione in the first film. “That’s Wizard’s Chess,” responds Ron, as if pitching the game to a room full of Hasbro execs. As evidenced by Duelyst, though, the gimmick is surprisingly effective. The first thing anyone will notice about Counterplay Games’s tactical RPG, collectible card game (CCG) hybrid is its irresistible pixel…
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Japan can’t stop depicting war as the cutest thing on the planet

What do the creators of games like I Am Setsuna, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney (2001), Demon’s Souls (2009), and SoulCalibur V (2012) have in common? They’re very familiar with Japanese videogame culture and what kinds of games thrive over there. They’ve got their names on some of the most esteemed games of the generation. They’re “grizzled.” And they’re all raring to make a strategy game! Tiny Metal, the culmination of their efforts under the studio name Area 34, is a turn-based game that’ll focus on intense tactical combat, backed up by a strong story. It wants to merge the grand tradition of military…
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Indirect combat is all you’ll have to tackle ENYO’s labyrinth monsters

In an industry that likes to stab stuff almost as much as it likes to shoot people, an “indirect combat” game might seem a little out of place. In fact, the concept has more in common with puzzles than fighting games, as the inability to directly attack your opponent means that the player is forced to use the terrain and any abilities they might have to their advantage. It’s the same idea as forcing a spider to fall off a cracked wall in Lara Croft GO (2015): if you can’t approach them directly, lure them to another doom.   drag…
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It’s you and your friends against mind-control tech in Signal Decay

The stealth strategy game Signal Decay, previously known as Squad of Saviors, has just made its way to Steam Greenlight. The premise is simple: you wake up one day and the rest of the world has come under the sway of some indomitable evil, so it’s up to you (and up to three of your friends!) to save humanity. Simple. But Signal Decay’s not content to just send you into the shadows and have that be that. Instead, Signal Decay takes relatively overdone tropes—cyberpunk world, mind control radio, lots of lurking around—and turns it into a strategic experience not unlike…
Tahira
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Tahira, a sci-fi epic that will question our violent histories this August

Before the imperialism of the 19th century, or the World Wars of the 20th, there were the Crusades: a series of military campaigns in the Middle-East between the 11th and 15th centuries. During these campaigns, various Christian European powers sent large numbers of well-equipped men to what was dubbed the Holy Land to fight against local inhabitants, as well as the largely Muslim Turks, who would eventually become the Ottoman Empire. They were fought for a number of reasons: to capture Jerusalem, to help the Byzantine Empire maintain control of its lands, arguably to attempt to reunite Eastern Christians with…
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Overland turns the post-apocalyptic road trip into a series of delicate dioramas

Overland has the look of something you could feasibly prod. It comes across as a series of cartoon-coated dioramas that are made to be admired up close. This is no accident. As designer Adam Saltsman explains in a new video about Overland, by having “clear, obvious visuals composed on a single screen,” what is usually an inaccessible genre—squad-based tactics in this case—is made “available to a new wider audience without sacrificing depth or challenge.” The idea is to help a group of people survive a hellish road trip across a ravaged America. The most obvious threat are the sound-sensitive beasts…
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Chaos Reborn, from the maker of X-COM, is playable now

Chaos Reborn, the latest entry into the tactical turn-based strategy genre from Julian Gollop, creator of the X-COM series, is now available for early access Steam. The current lineup of features in this boardgame-meets-Magic: The Gathering title is austere, as only online multiplayer is available. However, each of the modes not yet unlocked show a text explanation, with one glimpse highlighting possibly the game’s most interesting feature. While players start as a lowly apprentice wizard, through hard work and effort, they can attain the first social rank, “Wizard Lord.” From there, they can ascend further by collecting “artefacts,” winning multiplayer…