Chaos Front

ignore the time limit complaining weenies

This is an impressive old school turn based mecha SRPG, that takes inspiration from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Super Robot Wars and others. 1. Gameplay After picking 1 of 2 starting mercenary captains, the gameplay loop is divided into a strategic layer and a tactical layer. In the strategic layer, you decide which contracts to take, buy and upgrade mechs and starships and which factions to support. Once you start getting options, it is quite fun tinkering and customizing your strike force. All of your pilots have individual stats and abilities, so there is some thought required how to divide them into squads and which units to give everyone. Each of your capital ships has varying but limited hanger space for light and heavy mechs, and you'll usually put light mechs into squads of 3, though there can be reasons to split them. In the tactical layer, you engage in turn based battles manouvering your units around a grid followed by any allies, then enemies. The tactical battles are mostly well balanced and interesting, as the game knows roughly your power level with a rank system and contracts with ranks are actual custom missions, not randomly generated or "line your guys up against their guys and attack until you win" type missions, though there are plenty of fairly straight up fights. There is nothing super ground breaking, but overall well crafted with a good variety of objectives. For example, one early optional mission to unlock thrusters has the objective to land 1 hit on a thief in a very fast mech who is just running away while another mercenary force covers her retreat, forcing you to make a plan and potentially change up your squad. It seemed impossible at first, but after looking at options in the workshop, I customized one of my mechs to a particular pilot to give him increased move and sent him alone through an asteroid field to cut her off, while my main force engaged the enemy. On the discord afterwards, I was curious what strategy people used and 2 other players solved that mission in 2 different ways (one of them somehow winning in the first turn with some ridiculous combo I didn't think of/have access to). Or I'm hired to hold off an overwhelming force for 8 turns behind a wall of orbital satellites and a stealthed minefield and trying to force enemies into my artillery line. Or a researcher wanted to explore a xeno area and suddenly we're fighting aliens and eventually some giant boss in his quest chain. The game does encourage and expect you to pick and side with one of the warring factions. Doing so gives access to faction specific powerful units and you need to build up reputation before they trust you with more dangerous and advanced faction war battles or let you buy their good stuff. So if being absolutely true neutral appeals to you, be aware that this is technically possible, but limits your access to some units, missions and endings. It seems clear the intended way to play is to take various neutral missions but also make an impact on the war, picking which faction you agree with. 2. Special Effects All of the battles are animated (with an option to turn off if you want to go faster). For an indie game, this is impressive when you consider how many unit types and subtypes there are. And the animations are pretty good. Eg. Watching your onager unleash a rocket battery on an enemy squad is impactful and badass. When enemy starfighters blast your guys with machine guns or torpedoes, they immediately zoom away so you can't counterattack, which lines up nicely with their tactical role and special ability to avoid counterattacks. 3. Soundtrack: The effects and music are fine and fitting with the the retro theme but there are far too few tracks to listen to for a very long game, so you may end up playing your own mecha/space music after a while. 4. Localization The localization is far better than previous games. It's obvious an educated native level English speaker fully edited the text and it's all natural sounding. There are classical Ancient Greek references as well to reflect Lycurgus being a historical Spartan. And his starting custom mech is like a Greek hoplite with spear and power shield. 5 . Overall: I am very far from completing this game, not even finished my first playthrough after 20 hours. And for sure I would at least do another playthrough with the other main protagonist, even if I probably may not try to unlock all the units and endings. But I wanted to put an early review already as I saw a lot of people were complaining about a "time limit". The game is balanced around 3 years which is a huge amount of time. You don't need to that aggressively support your faction and can easily go off into neutral territory and do random missions and still not miss anything. You may want to reload if you get absolutely destroyed in a mission and have a huge repair bill and the game allows saving and loading at any time. This happened to me a couple of times mainly when I wanted to try a mission above my rank or just to see an enemy main faction fleet that I was nowhere near ready to face. Playing a self imposed ironman would be quite challenging for a first playthrough when you are still figuring out the mechanics and units, but might be a fun challenge run for a later playthrough. For turn based SRPG fans who like space combat (I guess there are not that many of us), you are very unlikely to be disappointed with this.