Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel
Let’s start this review off by saying that this game has a very mixed reputation, and for a very good reason.
Fallout Tactics isn’t like its forefathers Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. Fallout Tactics is a strategy game, and unlike its forefathers, has no speech skill, no major RPG elements, and more straightforward, action based gameplay. It has a very unique story, and is so far the only Fallout game that has its setting in the Midwestern United States.
Fallout Tactics has voiceacted dialog, unlike Fallout 1 and 2. Fallout Tactics also offers four difficulty settings, Easy, Normal, Hard, and Insane. Easy is about what you would expect, easy, it makes the game very very easy and significantly more easygoing. Normal isn’t much different, but it too offers a more story and action based game than the two harder difficulties. Hard is a minor step up from Normal, forcing you to play more adaptively, and sparringly with your supplies, as vendors either don’t restock, or you have to complete a mission for them to, making supplies very restricted if you waste them. Insane is exactly what you would expect, insane. It’s borderline impossibly hard if you play with Tough Guy Mode turned on, which I will touch on in a second. Insane mode drops your accuracy by a flat 20%, halves your average damage, curbs your chance to get criticals to extremely low, doubles enemy damage, resistence, accuracy, and worst of all, the enemy will get critical hits with frightening frequency. Strategy is everything on Insane. Your supplies become even more limited, and you will die many many many times, which makes Tough Guy even more bitter.
– Real player with 723.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Tactical Classic Games.
Short review
A good strategy title that allows us to reconnect with the universe of Fallout while discovering a different type of gameplay. Amateurs and neophytes alike should enjoy it despite the high level of difficulty.
Long review
So here we are, back in the nuclear winter of the world of Fallout. The devastating war that took place plunges us into the ruins of Chicago, in which the survivors of this apocalypse organize themselves to survive the hordes of looters, animals that have become wild or even mutants. A new category of warrior was therefore formed to defend the few remains of a humanity lost in this post-nuclear world: The Brotherhood of Steel. You will play as one of these knights of a new era and try to complete the many missions that await you, which will require you to use cunning as well as force. Exit the outright role-playing game as offered by the other titles in the series, Fallout Tactics is aptly named and invites us to immerse ourselves in turn-based tactical strategy.
– Real player with 255.9 hrs in game
Neverdark
_On December 24th, 2030 a global blackout occurred. In an instant the world lost access to electricity, and suddenly so many things that we had taken for granted were gone; the Internet, global communications, electronic devices… all gone.
War emerged as governments fell and society collapsed in upon itself. Guns, medicine and food became the new currencies while survival and protection became the sole necessities. Conflicts continued for years as ordinary people battled against famine, disease, the elements, and other humans.
A new world rose from the ashes of the old one. Each survivor enclave had a different idea on how to shape their new society: bands of raiders, religious cults, biker gangs, idealistic democratic communes and organisations built around charismatic leaders. Cities were once again battlegrounds, but it was no longer for survival, it was now for domination._
Neverdark is a pausable RTS game which throws you into a post-apocalyptic world. Following a global blackout, society has collapsed, and it will be your goal to rebuild it.
You lead a group of survivors, and you will need to contend with other factions over the control of the city. Invest resources and expand your influence to take over the city, street by street. Neverdark is as much about politics and social evolution as it is about combat.
In Neverdark you play in a fallen and ruined city. It is in desperate need of being rebuilt, and it will be your task to adapt it to the harsh conditions with makeshift infrastructure. Each map takes the shape of a real, existing city: Paris, New York and Tokyo. You will find yourself leading your citizens and expanding across familiar streets, taking over existing buildings and repurposing them. Perhaps you might want to use the Louvre Museum as the seat of your Black Market, or it might be a good idea to grow your crops on Rooftop Farms in Brooklyn. Building placement needs to be strategic and thoughtful. Where they’re placed, and the consequences of that choice, rests entirely in your hands.
A new type of society has emerged – one without a central government. Your goal is to react to dynamic, random events which force you to decide between doing what is ethically right and what is politically advantageous. New laws must be passed, and edicts must be enforced if civilisation is to evolve and adapt to ever-changing conditions.
One way or another you need to deal with other groups competing for control of the city. Both you and your enemies have powerful and influential agents at your disposal. You will need to send those agents, known in-game as specialists, across the city to perform political and military tasks. A Political Agitator in a neighborhood where two factions are fighting for dominance may help sway the locals into supporting you. But should that fail, and you find the enemy has gotten there first, a good long-range ‘motivator’ with a rifle could be equally effective. Inevitably the streets must turn crimson with bloodshed, and it will be your duty to lead your crew of specialists in tactical, turn-based combat missions.
Read More: Best Tactical Turn-Based Tactics Games.
1971 PROJECT HELIOS
I just have finished the game.
Is easy to see that the developers have given everything to make this game a very good one. The plot is incredibly good, the mechanics agroup all what you wish and even more in a strategy game, and the levels are really immersive (I love the cold effect in the screen).
I really recommend to play it, this game absolutely deserves the price that it has.
– Real player with 20.1 hrs in game
Read More: Best Tactical Indie Games.
A title that could serve as a welcome to new players to the strategy 3D turn-based combat. Encounters are short and sweet, requiring a decent amount of strategic thinking, without reaching desperation or those odd “I’m lost” moments.
Story is quite engaging, and the characters that go along with it are charming and interesting. Recommended!
– Real player with 18.8 hrs in game
Wasteland 2: Director’s Cut
August 22nd 2017: W2 Review by Tandberg_J (steam account name) (tandbergj@gmail.com )
Summary:
“The absolute dream for fans of the classic style of Fallout 1, and Fallout 2, and it’s still a good game even if you are just casually familiar with Bethesda’s Fallout reboots.”
This review is for the Director’s Cut Edition, which in 2017, has been mostly debugged, and is very stable. I play on a PC for the record, and can’t comment on the console ports. But, I’ve played and beat the original PC version as well, before the director’s cut was released, so I’ve seen the game’s development and refinement. (I recommend learning how to edit your save game files, [they are plain text .xml files,] as this allows you to avoid some glitches that might affect your game in purely mundane minor ways, and you can avoid little annoying bugs like not getting credit for a small side quest) Also, you can edit your characters and give them some clothing and aesthetics that are not available in the vanilla game. But this is optional of course. Also there is a huge mod scene for this game, which I can’t really say I’ve tried.
– Real player with 393.8 hrs in game
Did they pull it off?
I don’t quite know what I was expecting when I first backed the Kickstarter. Wasteland was a beloved classic, my first proper PC game, and it showed me just what games were really capable of. Problems with more than one solution, missions that could be failed without forcing a game over, the player’s responsibility to build a balanced team, the combination of descriptive paragraphs with the limited graphics to paint a more vivid picture; the experience blew my fragile little mind at the time. A contemporary title can do many or even all of those things, but whether they can match that feeling - the impression that I’m playing something truly groundbreaking - is a much more loaded question.
– Real player with 165.0 hrs in game
Marauder
It’s a highly recommended buy, though with many restrictions and prerequisites. Yeah, game-is-not-for-everyone’s-tastes.
First, you should really like squad-tactics games like Jagged Alliance, Silent Storm or 7.62 and DON’T BE a graphics freak who wants everything in 16:9 with 60fps. Game’s a bit dated, see? And still, it can be successfully compared by gameplay options even with latest tactics games. That slow-paced genre never was too hard about graphics. Physics, mechanics - that’s a prime, but high resolutions… meh.
– Real player with 214.7 hrs in game
First off let me say THIS ISN’T LIKE STALKER!!!! S.T.A.L.K.E.R games were my favorite PC games of all times and people comparing this game to S.T.A.L.K.E.R are doing so bc the game’s russian developed with russian voice actors and so-on and so-forth. Nothing from the atmosphere, the story, or the gameplay is that of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games. BUT this game, though not at the level of S.T.A.L.K.E.R is still an awesome game!!! It’s a tactical/strategic/survival-ISH game(u don’t really need food and water to survive it just helps with health, though not much w/o certain skills) w/ RPG character building elements (Skills, exp, etc). I"ve played Shadowrun, and 7.62 and i like this one better. PATIENCE IS A MUST to be able to get used to the camera as well as the all around beginning of the game.
– Real player with 54.5 hrs in game
Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden
“Mutant”, the pen-and-paper RPG which was born in 1984, the same year as Teenage Mutant Ninja cooters. Those two ideas weren’t that close visually in the ’80s. Swedish RPG “Mutant” was about harsh survival in the post-apocalyptic world which faced several catastrophes, one after another: global warming, viral pandemic, nuclear explosions. Most of the survivors turned into semi-intelligent ghoul cannibals, but the centers of civilization, such as the Ark, around which the action of the “Mutant” parties revolves, remain. Here among the surviving people, there was a place for mutants. They are better adapted to existence outside the Ark (in the Zone), so they work for the Ark society as scouts/hunters (stalkers). The main tasks are the extraction of useful resources to maintain the life of the Ark and its development, as well as protection from ghoul enemies. The board game turned out to be pretty tough, fraught with a quick loss in case of unsuccessful dice rolls and wrong choices. In addition, stalkers in the search always had a chance to catch a random, completely unpredictable mutation in advance - and then face all its unpleasant side effects.
– Real player with 76.3 hrs in game
Mutant Year Zero is a tactical RPG in the style of Wasteland 2 – similar environments, similar developments, similar tactics. Yet the game has a unique flavor of its own. You control three out of five characters which are all a little weird. Each character has their own abilities, and has their uses in the game. The game is full of tactical fights, many of which take a lot of thinking and planning to live through. Some of these fights are incredibly challenging, and definitely worthwhile to beat. The graphics are pretty good, with fantastic atmospheric lighting.
– Real player with 41.4 hrs in game
Dreadlands
A Mad Max era XCOM game…
As a huge fan of XCOM2 and Divinity OS2, I was looking forward to playing this game, but despite the indie-charm that it presents, it just has a bunch core of issues which makes it inferior to the other games above… So it’s XCOM2, but without much thought put into it…
Issues: If you shoot twice in a single turn with a gun, then it often gets jammed… this makes ranged combat significantly worse than melee combat (since melee combat has counter-hits AND melee-locks, so you can just run next to a ranged enemy and then he is melee-locked with you and you’ll get a free-hit if he tries to run).
– Real player with 212.0 hrs in game
@Turn:
“Weak narrative, lack of variety in maps coupled with superficial design, grinding and poor optimization result in a mediocre gaming experience. Only die-hard tactical combat fans may consider”
That’s true but I AM a die-hard tactical combat fans, so I consider it.
General
You play as a gangster crew which you can choose between three gangster faction: Scrapper, Tribe-kin, and Skarbacks. There is a main quest but there are also side quests. You can walk through a world map to visit quest point, encounter, and opportunities. Every start of the game you will be placed randomly through the world map so everytime you play, the chance that you start in the exact area and the exact same spot is very very little.
– Real player with 22.3 hrs in game
HighFleet
Great game that combines strategic gameplay similar to submarine simulations with tactical air battles between flying tanks.
You command a fleet with the aim of capturing the enemy capital city, while fighting off enemy fleets searching for you. Fleet movement is a game of cat and mouse using a very well realised radar system, aircraft carriers, cruise missiles, intercepting enemy radio signals and much more. When two fleets meet, the game switches to tactical battle in which you directly pilot a ship and fight against the enemy. You can design individual ships in your fleet from the groundup and then use them.
– Real player with 233.4 hrs in game
The all-time best ever flying submarines in the sky game ever made. Although I have spent most of my time obsessing over ship design, “submarine airship game” is the best description for this FTL-like rogue-like UNFORGIVINGLY Difficult game I can come up with; in campaign, you spend a lot of your time trying to manage 15 different simple things (signals analysis, threat tracking, resources and fleet management, navigation, combat, landing, and then the global story/factions/political overlay of story driven decisions). The ship editor will drive you on the express train to crazytown; every. single. decision. carries huge implications for your campaigns when you start running custom ships, and this gets into the infinitely complex fleet design (what roles do you want your ships to play is critical, and the game lets you figure out your own ways to fail). This is one of my favorite games of 2021.
– Real player with 84.1 hrs in game
Overland
Only 69% positive with only 285 reviews? I really feel sad for this game as it only got a Mixed Score on steam.
It’s really actually pretty good but the restriction of Rogue-Like difficulty, Random Generated map plus some designer choice made and many other factors made this game lost a lot of the scores.
The story itself is very basic that a meteorite strike earth that brings an alien specie of bugs that grow and expanded out of control beneath the earth. They are attracted to sound and noises and have infinite quantities so civilizations of mankind brought to an abrupt end with few survivors scattered about. They have to constantly stay moving to avoid the alien bugs and salvage what’s left of the old world to stay alive in a hopeless earth.
– Real player with 81.0 hrs in game
In short
Overland looks beautiful and has a cool concept, but it’s too focused on tedious tasks. It’s also a game that does not like to reward its players, which makes it hard to enjoy.
BTW, the game’s difficulty has been nerfed quite a bit since launch, so disregard reviews about the game being impossible. If anything, it may currently be too easy.
Long version
For me, the lack of fun in Overland starts with the self-contradictory nature of the game. Indeed, Overland constantly offers cool toys, but says NO whenever the player wants to use them. For example, you’d be forgiven for thinking this game was about tactical combat, with weapons aplenty and critters to use them on. Turns out that the game punishes you for killing a critter, as it results in a snowball effect that makes the map harder. You could actually argue that Overland’s core gameplay is to make dumb AI run around in circles, without hurting them, to give your other characters enough time to find fuel. It’s hard to remain excited about such a tactic after you’ve done it 4-5 times. Another example of this kind of contradiction is the equipment system. The game likes to drop all sorts of useful items, be it weapons, fuel, med packs, repair kits, flash lights, and so on. But characters in Overland only have 1 or 2 equipment slots which means you can’t pick up most of the items you find. The result is that you spend a ridiculous part of your time doing things like dropping your flashlight on the ground to be able to carry the newly found can of fuel, while your other character stores his med pack on the car in order to pick up the flashlight you just dropped … you get the idea. None of that is fun; it’s just tedious and annoying.
– Real player with 11.7 hrs in game
Wanna Survive
simple but good strategy game, I’ve enjoyed it a lot in my first hours.
After a while sadly, the game started to show its flaws. The second part of the game ramps up the difficulty so much that the game ended up not being fun anymore. It becomes more about exploiting the enemy AI and retrying. You are surrounded by a ton of enemies and you have to proceed by trial and error (played the game in original mode, which is hard mode).
Sure the game gives you the possibility to go back by one turn by paying in-game currency, but redoing the same turn over and over because you don’t want to lose any characters is not fun.
– Real player with 11.5 hrs in game
The game is a neat little hidden gem. With the gradual introduction as the stages go on of new characters with abilities, there is always something new to learn in order to make the dynamic of the group work better in fights. Wanna Survive has a very steep difficulty curve, in which things seem to go from 0 to 100 very fast. This isn’t neccesarily a bad thing upon reflection, but it definitely left me frustrated to begin with- however, one can’t say that the game is boring because it is too easy. I’ve played through to the end once, and though I won’t be replaying immediately to check off the last few achievements I can see myself picking it up once more for a second playthrough in the near future, which would take the amount of time I got out of this game to roughly 10-11 hours once all done.
– Real player with 7.4 hrs in game