​

Eventually you learn the ropes and start exploring. The world is handmade and general directions stay the same during each playthrough. Based on your seed, some settlements might look a bit different or enemies in a given area will change slightly. The same settlement might be a farmer village in one run, while in another you’ll only find burned down houses and orcs there. The next time, you find the buildings intact, but all the villagers have turned into zombies.

While this can make planning a bit harder, it’s nothing truly major. You might find some weak troglodytes with decent spears in one of the caves. You return there in the next life, hoping to loot their weapons, only to find bugs instead. It will hamper your early game if you were set on using spears, but you’ll obtain decent weapons soon enough.

There is one random factor that can easily kill you if you don’t pay attention. Every piece of equipment, be it crafted or generated in the world (on enemies), can be upgraded into an artifact. That scythe-swinging peasant can poke quite a hole in your body when he spawns with a unique spear.

There is no mechanic that will make you stronger on subsequent runs. There are no unlockables, secret powers or anything of that sort. The only difference is that during character creation, the game will show the talents that a given class can learn at the appropriate levels, provided you’ve reached that level first yourself. If anything, I found that obfuscation annoying, although it can be easily fixed if you navigate to your data files. In general, the configs aren’t hidden and the game seems easy to mod.

With the world being same-ish with each run, you become stronger only by not repeating the same mistakes. Though it can be annoying if your mistake was being ambushed by an enemy with some nasty artifact. In general, you’ll learn to run into more newbie-friendly areas. There you’ll establish a base with food, water and a bed, and then proceed to clear out nearby enemies so that your beauty sleep won’t be interrupted. Those sleeping in the woods usually get ambushed.​

The first difference you'll notice from Wasteland 2 is that it takes a page from Divinity: Original Sin and requires you to make or take just two rangers at the start. There's a greater focus on accessibility and the ability to immediately jump in and start playing: there are five groups of pre-made rangers, and they all come with unique background bonuses and utility items that no custom-made ranger can acquire to compensate for their non-powergamed attribute and skill allocation. In addition to this, they also have a few unique voiced banters with each other, though you'll hear them all in the early areas. Once you're past the tutorial, you can make or take two more rangers from a different and larger pool and/or fill up your roster with companions for a total of six; however, you must always have at least two rangers in the party and can have no more than four. Some purists may balk, but I was grateful I could start playing immediately and learn how I wanted to build my future characters through experiencing the game's content as opposed to making decisions for four different characters at the start with no context other than my previous experience with RPGs.

Wasteland 3's CLASSIC attribute system has also been modified from its predecessor. In Wasteland 2, the system encouraged only two kinds of builds: a useless-or-less-useful-in-combat charismatic skillmaster and a character who puts a roughly equal investment into attributes that maximize initiative, action points, and skill points. The initiative system that gave individual characters multiple combat turns in comparison to their opponents excessively rewarded high-initiative builds and excessively punished low-initiative builds; that's been replaced with the characters on each side going at once, though occasionally you may get lucky and receive a free use of action points. Action points themselves, while still important, aren't absolutely necessary to max out on every character; there are incentives to put those points elsewhere. Putting points into intelligence gives you one skill point per level of intelligence instead of modifying the number of points you get per level. Overall, viable build variety with regard to attributes has noticeably improved.

The skill system has been streamlined; the era of multiple container-unlocking skills is over. Lockpicking and Safecracking are now just Lockpicking, Handguns and Shotguns have been folded into Small Arms, Assault Rifles and Submachine Guns form Automatic Weapons, Bladed and Blunt Weapons are now Melee, Field Medic and Surgeon have been combined into First Aid (and it's no longer a requirement for reviving downed rangers), and Alarm Disarming and Perception have become Sneaky Shit. Brute Force is gone; now if you can't be bothered to invest in Lockpicking but still want to open a locked door, just attack it normally. The Smart Ass talking skill is also gone. They did add Armor Modding as a skill to complement Weapon Modding, but that's the only new one. Even with the fewer number of skills, a perfectly-optimized party won't be able to max out everything by the endgame; at least four skills won't be able to hit those final numbers (at least as far as the base game experience curve goes).

Additionally, annoyances like skill timers, chance-based skill checks, critical failures, and gun jamming are gone. I could take or leave the last two, but I don't miss the first two at all. Using a skill isn't quite instantaneous, but it's fast enough, and not having to keep clicking on an object until you succeed or critically fail is a welcome relief.

The inclusion of quirks and perks from the Director's Cut of Wasteland 2 has been carried over, and they've also added backgrounds that provide a small bonus. There are some good, great, and lousy options all around, so it's a pretty typical assortment for an RPG. With knowledge of the system, you can synergize all three to excel at a given role, so there's a decent amount of options here for the powergamers.

Inventory is now shared by the entire party and items no longer have weight, so encumbrance is no longer a factor. However, there are strength requirements to wear the strongest kinds of armor without penalty. While you can look at the inventory during combat, you can't equip anything you didn't have in your weapon and quick slots when combat started, so things aren't totally balanced in your favor.

Crafting was added in one of the patches. It saves you the trouble of having to backtrack to a store if you run out of a particular kind of consumable or ammo while out in the field as long as you meet the particular skill prerequisites. It's also used for making unique joke items that are worth a bit more than standard junk items, weapon and armor mods you absolutely want to have, and unique weapons, including final upgrades for the best weapons in the game. I'm usually not one for crafting, but I liked having it here. The presentation for weapon and armor mods could have been better though; there are roughly two dozen armor mods and fifty weapon mods and they're listed in alphabetical order instead of organized by type and rank. As a result, it's irritating to scroll through them while holding shift to look at their stats to find what you want.

[...] If "reactivity and choice" was the mantra for Wasteland 2, then Wasteland 3 adds "transparency and accessibility" as another design pillar. inXile pulled off a heavily-reactive turn-based, party-based RPG that looks and sounds slick and is largely frustration-free when it comes to starting and playing. They re-examined their systems and modified them without throwing out the baby with the bathwater, in contrast to other studios who have tried to do the same in the past. Sure, it's not the second coming of Jagged Alliance 2, and no, it's not a party-based Fallout, but it's my favorite Wasteland game. Its status as the 2020 RPG Codex Game of the Year is well-deserved.​

Your role is to survive in a hostile environment and grow up. Since your first meal ever was human flesh, and given the tragic backstory, some revenge in the future is to be expected. To help fuel it, it turns out that the first two areas have plenty of toxic waste to go around, and even a submerged nuclear power plant. Eating weird, mutated albino fish does put weird ideas in your head.

Will you carry out your revenge? Will you lose or keep your humanity sharkanity? Sharkness? Is there a good and a bad shark in all of us, constantly whispering to our gills?

(...)

Eventually you’ll be dealing with explosives. They start with dynamite, then progress into some sort of proximity explosive devices and eventually end in torpedoes. All of those can be grabbed in your jaws, delaying the explosion a bit. This leads to my favorite playstyle of grabbing random objects and tail-catapulting them at my targets. Once you grab anything, you can toss it both underwater and in the air if you jump upward.​

The game part consists of two connected strategic and tactical layers. As mentioned previously, you move your party on the strategic map and explore areas with a hovering question mark on top. The most important aspect to keep track of here is your food. The more your party wanders about, the more the members get exhausted and need to rest, for which you use food. There are five levels of exhaustion, each of them putting an ever-increasing number of Exhausted cards into your deck, which clog up your precious card space and are only good for recycling (more on that later). On top of that, there is a morale system which governs bonuses and maluses to armor and redraws (ditto). Your morale is dependent on how far you are straying from the main quest and whether you are traveling while tired. You cannot die of overexertion, but you can give in to despair and lose the game that way.

On your journeys, you will come across various events that give you food, currency, mystic herbs, items, and crafting materials (some events might also hurt you). I've already covered food; obsidian coins can be spent in settlements across the map to acquire anything you can think of, to hire companions, or in narrative events for specific outcomes. Mystic herbs are used for upgrading cards and healing persistent wounds (represented by harmful cards in your deck). The items give you armor (bonus health) and cards. This is a particularly genius move. It raises the value of equipment tremendously and pulls them up from the mire of being only stat sticks. There are no randomly-generated items. They are all unique and each item will give you the exact same card in every playthrough. Which items you get however is random, and not every class can equip every type. This is where the most impactful RNG lies. You can not pre-plan your builds because you don't know which items you will get.

I'd argue this is a right way to provoke "item fever". Hear that, Swen? There's a place and time for everything. You may take notes. Getting certain items can dramatically change your playstyle in unexpected ways, and this is the norm, not the exception. Items are technically classified in five tiers and are MMO color-coded for your convenience. Grey, green, blue, purple, and orange. Guess which color corresponds to which tier. Grey items are only the starting armor of the classes. You will never find them while adventuring. The higher the tier, the more cards (up to three at purple) and armor an item gives. Orange items, being legendaries, also grant you unique passive traits that are triggered in battle under certain circumstances. The most straightforward example is +2 damage on the first magical attack each turn. It gets wild after that. But wait! There's a twist. An item of a more prestigious color doesn't automatically mean it's better than the one below it, even if they give the same cards + the extra one(s). I'll explain why momentarily. Which brings me to the last strategic resource - crafting materials.

They are used to upgrade and "hone" equipment, or to permanently add a card granted by an item to a character's deck (i.e. you don't need to have it equipped anymore). Upgrading an item only improves the card(s) it gives, not armor or any traits (if legendary). Cards can only be upgraded once and each one has a unique way it improves. Sometimes it's very plain, like +1 damage or -1 willpower cost, but other times it even acquires additional effects. Honing is where it gets interesting. Remember how I said higher tier items aren't automatically better? The reason is you don't always want to fill your deck with junk cards which waste space in your hand and don't contribute to a build or tactic you are conceptualizing. The deadliest killer in this game in my opinion is having too many cards in your deck. This is where honing comes into play. Honing uses the crafting materials to remove a single card from an item. This allows you to keep cards you want and discard cards that uselessly take up space. This is not to say some cards are always garbage and unusable. I've found all cards have utility in some situations. It depends on your build and what other cards you have. There is one more thing in the strategic portion - followers. These are characters which you hire or get from quests that come along with you and provide you with passive non-combat buffs, like more health while resting or reducing the amount of crafting materials you need. There isn't much to say about these. They are a nice bonus, but nothing game-changing.

I can't get through a strategic overview without mentioning the classes. There are nine, but you start out being able to select just three (the Warrior, the Hunter, and the Elementalist) and you have to unlock the others through play. This is something I've always been fond of in roguelikes harking back to Tales of Maj'Eyal. It gives you very significant rewards for playing the game without lowering the difficulty of subsequent runs. These classes are much easier to unlock than in something like ToME however, and you are given an option to just unlock everything from the start (which I advise against). I suspect this is for players who once unlocked everything, but have long lost the save files and have no way to get them back. ToF's optional online feature doesn't track this kind of progress like ToME's does (but I digress). Each class has its own starting set of cards and special ability. The Warrior, for example, gives +2 defense to all heroes after playing a card while adjacent to an enemy. Even though this may seem abysmal, there are ways to make these abilities very powerful and the cornerstone of your build. The starting set is always very basic and mostly consists of universal cards like a melee attack or movement, but every class has some unique cards in the starting arsenal and is always given unique cards when leveling up, up to four you can choose at each level. You can opt to either replace a card you already know (cards from items don't count) or upgrade an existing one. This keeps the decks from growing exponentially and wards off power creep.

Outside of character levels in the current adventure, there's also a soul level that persists through runs. This is where the roguelite element (one element) appears. When you win or lose a run, each character individually gains soul experience which contributes to the soul level. Each soul level up to 10 grants you a unique class card which you can choose while leveling your characters in an adventure. I didn't get a card at soul level 11, so it either stops at 10 or granting cards gets more infrequent the higher level you are. As far as I can tell, this is something the developers implemented fairly recently. I was able to find forum threads in which people ask what the soul level does (during Early Access) and a developer responds with "nothing right now". Here's the kicker however. This can potentially make subsequent runs harder and not easier. I argued in the beginning that the roguelite element is a wolf in sheep's clothing and the reason is that it could oversaturate your class pool and make it harder to get the class card you want while leveling up. It's quite paradoxical and I'm not sure whether this is a con or simply neutral. For now, I'm going to say it's neutral because adapting to what RNGesus gives you is half the game. I haven't yet lost a run because I couldn't get the class card I want, but I also haven't played on a higher difficulty than hard (which is the third out of 13 difficulty levels). As a bouncing off point to talking about the battles, it's worth mentioning that some classes have mechanics and resources that others don't. Combined with the uniqueness of the classes themselves, this makes every party composition surprisingly diverse in terms of playstyle.​

Once you secure your first boat (and there are at least two ways to achieve that – one that makes you dependent on a certain faction and another that allows you to stay independent for a while longer) you can try your luck on the high seas. This is where the game truly shines: it offers true ship porn and lets you have lots of fun. You start with the most basic vessel: a schooner. It’s fast, agile, and can be crewed by a few dozen men. It allows travel between islands but has a weak hull, limited room for cargo, and only a few cannons. You will not do a lot of pirating with this one. Thankfully, when confronted by enemies at sea, the schooner can easily outrun them. However, you’ll soon want to find something larger and more dangerous. There are six types of vessels in Vendetta, ranging from small galleons and maneuverable frigates all the way to powerful man-o-wars and ships of the line. Each ship type has a number of stats: the hull and sails, speed, maneuverability, maximum crew, and cannons. These stats can be improved thanks to an upgrade tree with numerous enhancements, which are usually acquired at the expense of cargo space. Additional upgrades can be unlocked as a reward for quests for certain individuals and factions. The only limitation is that you can only have one ship. When you purchase a new one, the old one automatically gets sold (although you do get back some of the money you invested into upgrading it).

In order for a vessel to sail, it requires a crew – both regular sailors and officers. The former can be recruited in any settlement. The latter must be tracked down in various places ranging from taverns to jails. Some will join the crew for cash, others after completing certain quests. There are first officers, boatswains, gun masters, navigators, doctors, and carpenters. Officers come with numerous advantages: they can improve the aim of cannons and shorten reload times, conduct repairs without having to stop at a port, heal the wounded, or improve crew discipline which increases morale and lowers salary costs. However, some officers can also decrease your reputation or cause dissatisfaction among the crew. You can check their stats and biographies in the crew section of the menu. Officers add some character to your crew and allow for a bit of min-maxing. Your people also require food rations and salaries. The larger the crew, the more expensive each sea voyage becomes. Add to that the cost of ammunition and repairs and you get quite a serious list of expenditures.

How do you earn enough money to satisfy all these needs? There is a certain amount of gold to be claimed by completing quests and plundering ancient temples. But the only stable and reliable source of income is sea trade. You have your cargo hold, so use it! There are eleven categories of products that can be bought and sold, ranging from tobacco, rum and cannabis to ebony, sugar and silk. Each civilized island produces certain products and requires others. The rules of supply and demand will determine your trade routes throughout the Caribbean. However, keep in mind that the system is dynamic. If you sell too much rum to an island that wants it, you will flood the market and the prices will drop. Sometimes if you have full cargo of a certain product, it’s better to sell it in several colonies rather than just one in order to receive the best prices. If you try to buy too much of a certain product, its price will increase due to increased demand and lower supply. The system forces you to think and consider your options. When you have a quest objective on the other side of the map, you will most likely plan your journey so that you earn as much as possible before reaching your destination.

Of course, this is a pirate game, so you don’t have to pay for stuff: plundering ships on the high seas is also an attractive option. When sailing from one island to another, various random encounters will be offered to you – other ships or flotillas which will appear nearby – and you can choose to try your luck and engage them. Sometimes Christopher’s ship will be attacked by enemy vessels and then battle becomes inevitable, although it is possible to run away from tough fights if the wind is favourable and Raven’s vessel is fast enough. Sea battles are mandatory during certain quests (including the main quest), so it’s best to be prepared and keep a cargo hold with every possible type of ammunition.

Vendetta’s sea battles require some training and getting used to, but they’re even more enjoyable than their land-based counterparts. You maneuver your ship (taking into consideration the direction and strength of the wind), select an ammunition type and aim your cannons. By changing the angle by which the cannons are raised, you determine how far the cannonballs will fly. The game offers no visual aid to help you target enemy ships. You simply choose an angle, fire your cannons, evaluate the result and then adjust for better accuracy. Keep in mind however that ships are constantly on the move and the waves hitting them can make it more difficult to aim. Sometimes there are also weather impediments, such as a deep fog that limits visibility. This requires you to fire into the mist and look for explosions to see if the cannonballs hit.

Each ship has three HP bars – hull, sails, and crew. Accordingly, there are three types of ammo that target these bars – cannonballs which are best used against hulls (although they can destroy sails too), grapeshot which is used for killing crewmen, and chain shot which is the most effective at destroying sails. If the hull is breached, the ship simply sinks and you cannot plunder it. When sails and masts are destroyed, it is no longer able to maneuver, but may still fire when other ships pass by. If the crew is eliminated, the vessel will stop sailing and firing and basically become a ghost ship.

When nearby foes are defeated and only one enemy ship remains afloat, you may try to board it. It is a risky (an unsuccessful boarding means game over) but rewarding business. The surviving crew members will put up a fight and then the boarding mini-game begins. Surprisingly, unlike regular land and sea battles, it is turn-based. Christopher Raven does not personally board the enemy vessel but commands his men from afar. The choice is between engaging in melee combat and firing your cannons at point-blank range. After each turn the result is calculated (losses to both crews and destruction of both vessels). You then evaluate the situation and make another decision. Be careful – barraging an opponent’s hull at point blank might sink his ship, which means you won't get your hands on his precious cargo. If your foe has fewer men, a melee attack is usually the better course of action. After the enemy crew is butchered, you can decide what to plunder from the captured vessel (the size of your cargo hold is a limitation here). And when you’re done, you get to make one final decision whether to leave the ghost ship be or set it on fire.

Vendetta allows not just small sea duels but also larger clashes between several units or even flotillas from different factions. The largest battle I participated in during my playthrough pitched more than twenty vessels from England, France, and Spain against each other. Surviving such battles requires tactical thinking, careful positioning, and choosing one’s targets wisely. Positioning your ship between two enemies means trouble – your hull will be barraged from both sides with catastrophic results. You can try to use hostile ships to your advantage in a similar way by hiding from the volleys of more powerful foes behind them. All in all, Vendetta’s sea combat system can produce some very memorable and impressive fights. It may seem difficult and unnecessarily complicated at first, but once you understand and master it, you’ll have a great time pirating your way through the Caribbean.​

The game begins with a short intro cutscene, but there is no character creation sequence as such. Our PC starts out simply standing on a beach. We can name him, distribute several points between five main stats, and invest two points into one of three available perks. The stats are strength, health, agility, perception, and "erudition", which is basically intellect and charisma combined. Throughout the game the PC will gain access to fifteen perks, which are mostly focused on stealth and melee combat. Each perk has three levels of advancement. There are no skills in the game and hence no skill checks. Stat checks in dialogue are very rare. Sometimes high erudition provides you with an additional dialogue choice or allows you to talk someone into helping you without material gratification. But that is all you will get out of making your guy a smooth talker. Upon gaining a new level you get one stat point and one perk point, which you may invest as you see fit.

Unfortunately, the system is very basic and unbalanced. There’s only one way to build your character well. On my first try, I created the character I usually play in Fallout games: an eloquent gunslinger (high perception, agility, erudition). Soon I learned that such a build is simply unfeasible in Krai Mira. Erudition provides too few opportunities to justify the stat investment. And as for perception, while the game offers a wide selection of guns, rifles, crossbows, and flamethrowers that use five different types of ammo, it provides far too few bullets. A gunslinger cannot allow himself the luxury of a weapon of choice. He has to hold on to any ammunition he can find and carry several guns in order not to be caught with an empty barrel. Unfortunately, in order to carry those guns or operate heavier weapons, he needs high strength. And in order to deal with the game’s hordes of melee enemies, he needs high agility to get more action points during his turns, so that he can shoot and then flee to safety. High health, required to wear better armor, becomes an unobtainable luxury as you'd have to spread your precious stat points too thinly. After several hours of this, I abandoned my eloquent gunslinger and restarted. Playing such a character was just too tedious and unfun.

The one and only feasible build is a melee tank, which is also reinforced by the majority of available perks. You put points into strength, health, and agility and keep on doing it until they all reach 13-15 points (which is about when the game will end). This will allow the PC to wear the best armor and carry the best melee and projectile weapons, with tons of health points and a decent damage reduction. Of course, due perception being a dump stat he can only shoot the automatic rifle at point-blank range, but at least he can do it. A point-starved gunslinger would never be able to reach the strength value of 13 needed for such a feat. The melee tank mostly fights on the front lines, which is good since the few party members you meet in the game are extremely stupid and die easily. So you need to position your PC in front of these idiots so that the enemies hit him instead.

That said, the combat actually feels pretty solid. With only one feasible build, it's a simple matter of smacking enemies with the biggest club or blade you can find. Guns sometimes offer several fire modes and bursts can hit multiple foes, but you need to conserve ammo so going in guns blazing is rarely a good tactical choice. In true Fallout tradition you can only control the PC while your party members fight on their own, governed by the AI. When human allies are present on the battlefield you ought to take care to strike the killing blow against your foes, otherwise you won't receive experience points. There is an exception to this rule, though. Enemies killed by your most loyal follower, the dog Rudi, do grant you experience.

The enemy AI is simplistic but aggressive, and may pose a challenge through sheer brutality. Hostile combatants try to swarm you with their usually superior numbers and melee fighters do their best to protect the shooters. They attack with truly suicidal determination and retreat only when left with a couple of health points and no medical supplies. Since there are no grenades, the only effective method of crowd control is through the generous use of traps. But since traps pose a serious threat to your allies as well, it's best to avoid them if you're not fighting on your own.

Apart from that, most tactics revolve around choosing when to inject stimpacks and drugs into your PC's system. And of course, selecting your targets is also important. You should always go for the shooters first, even if it exposes you to numerous melee attacks on the way. Despite the system's simplicity, dispatching enemies with a large hammer, a chainsaw, or a katana is very gratifying (and gory). Even better, all the enemies move at the same time during their turn, so you don't have to wait for long minutes as in Fallout. While there is plenty of combat, it does not waste your time, which is a good thing.

Combat difficulty changes significantly over the course of the campaign. At the beginning, it’s similar to Piranha Bytes' Gothic series. You often have to rely on allies and in their absence may be forced to flee from the battlefield, as any confrontation can prove lethal for an ill-equipped and inexperienced PC. After you’ve gained some levels and acquired better gear, your situation improves drastically and fighting even large groups of foes becomes feasible. However, during the endgame you start encountering squads of heavily armed elite soldiers, and their machine gun bursts can quickly eat through hundreds of health points. At this point in the game you have to pick your battles, mind your positioning, and use every natural barrier to protect yourself from enemy fire. This evolution, combined with an acceptable level of enemy variety, helps keep things fresh.​

Combat in Horizon’s Gate is turn-based and takes place on a grid directly on the map. Characters can cast protection and enhancement spells before combat and can also initiate combat by attacking with a long range attack skill. Unlike the previous games in the series, battles begin with a formation phase where you can arrange your characters in a small area and choose the direction they’re facing.

The combat system is based on time-ticks, with a queue that takes note of the turn order and remaining recovery time for each character. During a character’s turn he can move and use an action, in any order. Not moving or performing an action will decrease the recovery time until his next turn. Recovery times are not otherwise determined by a character’s last action, and different creatures have different recovery times. There are certain skills that also require a preparation phase. They can be interrupted during this time, though simply inflicting damage won't be enough - you'll need to stun or disable the character or use an ability which cancels skills. Pushing the character will only do the trick if the skill’s effect depends on him being in his original position. Some skills also cost magic points to use.

Characters have the following stats: movement, physical and magical damage, dodge and damage reduction, proficiency scores in the various weapon types, which are added to hit chance and damage, and affinity with elements, which determines both the power of elemental attacks and the character’s resistance to those attacks. Backstabbing allows you to ignore the dodge stat. All damage values in the game are fixed.

You can inflict many of the classic RPG afflictions on your enemies - burning, poison, frost, silence, poison and disabling. An oiled character will take more damage and will automatically be burnt by any fire attack, while a wet character won't take much damage from fire but will take a lot from ice and lightning attacks. Electric attacks will spread in water puddles (likely created by a previous ice attack) dealing damage to all characters standing in them. Weapons can be charged with elemental power, and many elemental skills with various areas of effect are available, both to your party and to enemies. I found that you don't really need to care about enemies’ elemental resistance, but it's a good idea to pay attention to their resistance to afflictions.

The layout of the battlefield can play a decisive role in combat, especially when you can push enemies off cliffs using wind attacks. Shooting explosive plants from a distance can also be useful.

Encounter design is one of the game’s high points. Some of the creatures you'll encounter were already present in Alvora Tactics, while others are brand new. When you're not fighting against swarms of poisonous flies, worms which duplicate when damaged by weapons, explosive beetles, or monsters whose shells can only be damaged with hammers, then you're probably fighting against a party of characters who can use the same equipment and skills as your own. They’re quite effective at using skills, and you’ll get their equipment if you defeat them.

Enemies are able to use many different skills, are smart enough to get out of the impact zone of any currently charging skills, and will punish you for positioning your character in a way that allows them to target many characters at once. The enemy AI is unpredictable which can make for some fun battles.

You’ll get to fight against a few lone boss enemies with extremely high health and defenses. These fights may take a while depending on your damage output. Magic point restoration skills and healing consumables will prove useful.

As previously mentioned, some towns have a dojo that offers a challenging battle against a party of characters. They’re typically all trained in a single weapon type but have different classes. These battles are fun, and your reward for beating them is a powerful weapon and also the ability to increase the proficiency of your entire crew with that weapon type for a price.​

One perhaps controversial point that I want to make at this point has to do with the move away from simulationist design which has become fairly common in modern squad tactics, arguably heralded by the rebooted XCOM series. In a nutshell, games that do this will often treat guns, auxiliary items and physical abilities more like D&D spells than their real-life counterparts. This annoys me to no end when it's applied to games with more "realistic" backdrops, because in addition to throwing believability out the window, it also tends to hamper creative play across the board. Gone are the days of tossing a backup weapon from soldier to soldier when your front man’s gun jams in a tight spot, or rushing over to a fallen enemy to pick up the grenade he dropped – sacrificed for the commodification of tactical manoeuvres.

So where does Broken Lines fall on this scale? The answer is somewhere in the middle. Like Firaxis XCOM, grenades and healing items are not singular objects, but abilities of sorts, which are assigned to your units at the start of a mission and which have a set number of uses, replenish for each battle, and cannot be redistributed or dropped in the field. What’s more disappointing is that there is also no looting of any kind, apart from the aforementioned supply caches. Enemies will not drop their items, and you will find no stashes of weapons or auxiliaries in the maps themselves. The only way to gain new stuff is to buy it from the merchant. Your own weapons can’t be dropped or swapped mid-mission either, and all guns have unlimited ammo.

None of this gels at all with the premise of the story nor with the gameplay itself. You’re supposed to be commandeering a small group of soldiers stranded behind enemy lines, scrounging for survival, yet the resource management, which should have been a major concern, is practically non-existent. At no point will you have to think carefully about rationing supplies in the field (by which I mean actual supplies like grenades or healing items, not food), because they don’t really exist, and there are no overarching worries beyond making sure your soldiers don’t die. The best games manage to weave long-term strategic considerations into the moment-to-moment tactical decision-making; Broken Lines, despite the overall structure providing a perfect slate, doesn’t even try.

The actual combat mechanics fare a lot better in this regard, though they haven’t been spared completely. For one, bullets that miss their target will disappear into the ether when the maximum range of the weapon that fired it is reached. Then there are some downright silly abilities, like “Drunken”, which boosts courage at the expense of accuracy for a short while (to top it off, this is also completely useless).

However, there are a couple of cool systems that make up for it. First is the fact that bullets in Broken Lines are real game objects, which means that each one will travel until it hits something (or gets swallowed by the god of Balance if it travels too far), whether that something is an enemy, an ally, or a piece of scenery. This is good because it makes cover work like it should, which is by actually blocking the path of incoming fire rather than just conveying a flat reduction to enemy accuracy.

Another advantage of this is that it feeds into another cool system, which is stress. The stress mechanic is central to the combat of Broken Lines, and it works like this: in addition to HP, each soldier has a stress bar which fills up when bullets pass near them. When it reaches a threshold, the soldier will panic for a few seconds. A panicking soldier will look for an escape route, and if he finds one he’ll run for it, but most of the time he’ll just cower in place. You won’t be able to issue orders to a panicking soldier until he calms down.

Stressing out your enemies is essential to taking them down, which means that automatic weapons are going to be your new best friends. All weapons in this category fall under the "SMG" type, and in addition to the high rate of fire, they have another trick up their sleeve that make their suppressive capabilities even more powerful. Each weapon type in the game, in addition to its native properties, has a distinct special firing mode, and the special firing mode of the SMG consists simply of rattling off at full blast blanketing a specified area with heavy fire. It’s inaccurate, but guaranteed to cause any enemies within it to panic, and you can direct it at will rather than just have it target the closest enemy. This means that the primary usage of the SMG is to pin down enemies in cover and cut off any escape routes, while the rest of the squad moves in and takes them down from the flanks. This can be combined with camouflage from thick vegetation, as well as elevation bonuses, for some properly devastating manoeuvres. It's nice to see that after years of games that either ignore the potential of this mechanic or else half-ass the implementation, a game has finally been made that gets cover fire right.

So how do missions actually play out? Well, most of the time you’ll pick out a route at the beginning that takes you to the finish point, ideally via any supply caches that may be present, and then advance along it, engaging in the suppress-and-flank dance whenever you encounter groups of hostiles. That’s pretty much it.

And you know what? It’s a lot of fun. There are a few key things that make it work. First of all, there’s the fact that the onus is generally on you to advance while enemies wait for you to approach, meaning that there’s almost never an occasion to pull out the old “line up the firing squad and wait for the enemy to file into a bottleneck like lemmings” trick. The score system also helps here, since if you want to get a perfect score you can’t dawdle. This is thrown into relief during the few missions where you’re tasked with defending yourself against an enemy counterattack or ambush, at which point the game turns into a tower defence of sorts, which isn't nearly as much fun.

Moreover, battles also encourage you to stay mobile as much as possible. A lot of cover is destructible and will be decimated by machine gun volleys within a single turn, and grenades and heavier artillery, should the enemy have it, will wreck your soldiers no matter what sort of cover they're hiding behind, not to mention that enemy soldiers aren’t afraid to move to better positions if you let them.

This all combines to make battles very dynamic affairs. I’ve thought about why I’ve had more fun with this game than it feels like I should, given how basic it is. It boils down, I think, to the simple recipe of a few interlocking systems pulling in the same direction. The game wants to constantly keep you moving and moving around and behind enemies, and every facet of gameplay serves to reinforce this idea. It does this with very little variation throughout, since you'll mostly be fighting the same enemies from beginning to end, and you'll have access to all the weapon types from the get-go. And yet it works. If I might make another return to my XCOM vendetta, there’s a marked contrast here in that the tactical layer of Broken Lines seems to encourage you to explore its workings and get familiar with it, instead of covering a pedestrian foundation with an ever-increasing load of fancy toys.
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