Like the best mechs and XCOM agents, the turn-based tactics genre is reliable. It's elegant, precise and uses its small bag of ingredients so well that you'll be frequently stumped, but also overjoyed when you finally figure out how to squash the alien bugs. It's straightforward, but don't think for a second that makes it any less capable of conjuring up some bastard-hard tactical puzzles. You get three mechs, a few abilities and a handful of enemies you can quickly familiarise yourself with. There's still a campaign and character progression, but you're only ever a few minutes away from another brisk, engaging brawl. Into the Breach, our 2018 Game of the Year, was a reminder of what really makes these games so compelling. While I live for this stuff, it doesn't matter if the turn-based battles are rubbish. It's really a nightmare for me: a turn-based tactics game I can just keep playing. And once my shopping is done, there's always a big list of contracts, branching scenarios and story missions to undertake. Every new system is another opportunity to find more weapons and modules for my mechs, along with parts that can be used to construct even more of them, so I'm endlessly tweaking and building. The galaxy-scale sandbox gives you a ship, a crew and a bewildering number of directions. I'm on a big BattleTech kick at the moment and if I ever want to see the campaign through I'm going to have to make it my life. All these elements have been around since the '90s, but modern tactics games have really leaned into them, and none more so than BattleTech. What you do outside of the tactical battles has grown in importance, with campaigns full of construction and unit management that take up almost as much time as the fights themselves. Even now, big publishers generally don't seem interested in these games, leaving it up to single-minded devs and 'indie' publishers to drive the genre. Wargroove's story is similar, with Chucklefish noticing the gap left by a classic game and creating something to fill it. Triumph Studios had to take a gamble when it revived the Age of Wonders series with Age of Wonders 3, publishing the game itself, but it paid off, paving the way for expansions and the sequel. They are universes apart, even if they share a few fundamentals. One is a sci-fi 4X game with tactical battles, while the other is pure tactics game inspired by Advance Wars. A simple slip-up can cause the most methodical of infiltrations to go awry, leading to a heart-thumping-but still turn-based-chase.Ĭombat and action still dominate, but that leaves room for games as dramatically different as Age of Wonders: Planetfall and Wargroove.
The random maps are high-tech puzzles full of alarms, doors and turrets waiting to be hacked, with danger increasing with each turn. It's a stealthy roguelike affair where you want to avoid killing. Instead, the flexibility of tactics games has led to things like Invisible, Inc., where soldiers and aliens are replaced by cyberpunk spies and hackers. Its influence still looms large, but the genre might have floundered again if everyone was just chasing Firaxis' remake. That's not to say there haven't been games to follow in its wake that defy that definition, and those that do still find ways to set themselves apart. If you want to describe the broad strokes of a turn-based tactics game now, you can just say it's "like XCOM" and people will probably know what you're talking about. XCOM has even changed the way we talk about games. Squads are also smaller, but more customisable, making the loss of any of them devastating-a trend that's largely been continued. XCOM is a reimagining of a series that was already acclaimed, but with a more cinematic and character-driven bent. It didn't quite have the same impact, however. I say 'arguably' not because there is any doubt that this has been a fantastic decade full of smart, tactical battles, but because the extremely slick Frozen Synapse came out in 2011, a year before XCOM, and was just as impressive. There was a lull, certainly in attention, after the '90s, but then XCOM: Enemy Unknown came along and lit a fire under the genre, arguably kicking off the decade of turn-based tactics games, which I never would have imagined saying at the start.
There have been few moments over the last decade where I've been far from a grid full of little soldiers duking it out turn by turn.
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