Invasion: Neo Earth

For a title in its first month of early access, I've been playing this much more than I expected. + Xcom aesthetic + A fantastic soundtrack + Decent amount of levels to keep you busy + Varied unit roster with multiple loadouts to experiment with + The developer is responsive to player feedback and bug reports. I've made bug reports and then seen patches released within 10 hours of the report! Currently, this game focuses more on team composition with the different unit types that give you access to 2-3 different loadouts for each unit. The unit types consist of stock infantry, commandos, snipers, RPG guys, men on small hover craft, tanks, artillery, AT-ST-like mechs, various kinds of fighters and bombers. Each have different values of movement, hover craft bypass water, and flying aren't limited by any obstacles. Each unit has multiple available loadouts that vary in their range, damage value and damage type that can be more or less effective against the various enemies that are expected in each mission. Each level will have some objective, usually to defeat the alien base, protected by multiple enemies. You will see a handful of enemies to start with, and more will teleport in as you advance. Combat consists of 4 phases: [olist] [*]your team moves [*]your team attacks [*]the enemy moves [*]the enemy attacks [/olist] As you get to act first, successful combat involves putting your team in a position where you can effectively take out enemies fast enough that they won't damage your units. You need to take into consideration their type, how many hitpoints they have, and your team composition with damage output, damage type and ensuring the units are close enough that their range allows you to attack the enemy. As of this review, there is no chance to hit, no cover or unit stance mechanics, no leveling up of units. Recommended.

Do not expect a retro X-Com, there is no xp system or overworld management. This one is all about strategic turn-based combat with an emphasis on optimal positioning. PLANNING PHASE: First, pick a front/middle/back set of units ranging from your four regular ground soldiers to heavy bombers and their drones, or super soldiers and their heavy weapons. The more powerfull the units are, the more funding they eat up. Once you've picked your three sets of units, it's time to decide what pre-set weapons they get. This is impactful because it defines the shooting range, damage and damage type of your units for the following battle. FIGHTING PHASE: Plays out a bit like an old x-com mission, but with simpler rules: A moving phase allowing all your units to move in the order you choose, allowing to explore, get to cover... Then comes the firing phase, again each unit in range can shoot once in your order of choice. When your fighting turn is over, the aliens and civilians get their turn. Battle maps are small and bring some thrill to your cold plans when a unit turns into an alien or when you realize you need to destroy a generator because that big alien base is under energy shield protection :) Overall a simple and relaxing turn-based combat game with a large cast of units to pick from and destroy, a green thumb up from space!

5/10 A sci-fi TBS. TBS similar to Advanced Wars, Panzer General, Battle Isle, UniWar and others. In tactical battles you pick up crates with credits ("PR"s). Credits don't get spent but simply add up and allow you to pick more expensive units for the next fight. TLDR: it offers traditional gameplay on a tiled board. Yet its lackluster presentation, poorly designed UI and unbalanced (way too low) difficulty after you've completed a few missions make it look more like a prototype or an early build that wasn't playtested. I did enjoy it somewhat until about mission 5 when it became so easy that it wasn't even a strategy anymore. So, a neutral vote from me, 5/10. Good: - a couple dozen different unit types in total, land and air - before battles, instead of individual units, you select 3 squads, each with 4 units. While this doesn't affect battles themselves, it's an interesting realistic touch because in real armies indeed regiments have varied units in them - can customize weapons of every unit before battle start. E.g. the bazooka guy can turn into a machine-gunner or a flak cannon guy. Depending on which weapon you choose, the unit will be more powerful vs some aliens and less powerful vs others - some additional mechanics: base protected by a shield (need to destroy a generator first) So-so: - very basic graphics. No animations of units (human soldiers just slide between tiles, alien zombies just disappear when killed etc). - music tracks are mostly average. There is one electric guitar track (plays in battles) that I liked and a few that I found unpleasant. Overall, after playing for a while the music feels more like an annoyance - sfx are limited and pretty basic - the game has an unusual 2-stage squad turns combat system. First you give movement orders to all of your units in any order (can't undo them btw, so if you misclick, tough luck, since there is also no save/load); then you give shoot orders. Although this kinda adds realism (you can't kill an enemy and walk into its tile in the same turn), it makes battles slower and breaks your thought flow. In other games, it's much more comfortable when you move a unit, shoot and feel you're "done" with it. So, you'd end your turn once you're "done" with all of your units. But here the movement phase is just multiple "open loops" which get carried over to the shooting phase. Btw, for the enemy turns, these stages just introduce unnecessary delays and also break the logic flow, and you first see all enemies move but not shoot at you as if they forgot why they were walking to you - but then no, here are they recalling that they are still in combat and doing their shots - the game shows "M" over units which have moved and "F" over units that can still fire. This introduces visual clutter and still isn't clear enough if you have a big (10+) group of units standing. Usually games just darken or gray out units that have run out of action points. Other games like to show HPs as overlays instead, and as numbers (here they are just green bars), or maybe also other unit stats, like how much damage a unit does (yet here it's an interval, like 11-30). Maybe it would be worth showing an icon of which dmg type the unit is susceptible to? - can't drag the map with the mouse, only push cursor to a screen edge - and then the camera moves too slowly. I ended up assigning WASD keys to camera movement, and it was okay-ish - no exp for units and apparently no healing. It feels lame that you can't repair those bots since it's just so common in TBS games - the 1st mission is rather slow simply because the map is big and all units you can deploy are infantry and move just 1 tile diagonally or 2 tiles straight - terrain seems to rarely affect movement. E.g. units still move the same number of tiles on roads or hills or forests. The only real limitation is the mountains (over which btw mortars can't shoot but hovertanks can) - most enemies aren't visible on the map at battle start. Instead they just appear on tiles once your units enter certain areas of the map. This feels RPG-ish and not TBS-ish since you can't really plan ahead. I guess, if the dev wanted to have suspense, there could be just fog-of-war? Right now you don't really see which tiles you've already "explored". There is no clear "sight range" of your units - mortar has the same attack range (5) as one of the tank's cannons or the big robot's cannons. So, there is no artillery really? - missing when doing a shot at a base or a tower seems strange: they are buildings after all, should be big enough? Bad: - no tutorial. I mean, I've been playing TBS games since 1994 so I kinda know my way around. Still, it wasn't clear what gives defense bonus to units, or what "DEF" stat does, or "PWR" (there is DMG already? so it must be Hitpoints?) - the overall color palette is pretty ugly. It's mostly gray color with blue or green sprayed in. The background of the battle map is just a hideous Window 95-style blue-to-black gradient - UI is really bad. E.g. after you complete a mission, you need to press Save to make a save. If you press Back (the only other button available), it takes you to the starting screen and your progress is lost! I had to re-play the first mission again because of this. Can't go back once you've selected 3 squads if you change your mind and want to pick different squads - when you mouse over enemies, the tooltip (which is shown after an annoying delay and also with a needless annoying sliding animation) doesn't show how far this unit can move or shoot. And these stats are actually the most important ones if you want to determine which of your units this enemy can reach - the panel at the screen bottom shows just empty panels when no unit is selected. This looks strange. Should these panels have been filled with stats of the unit under cursor? That would make more sense and give more info about enemies - no saves in-battle - annoying delays e.g. when each enemy skips their attack because of no targets in range - unbalanced difficulty? By mission 4 I had 4500 PRs, with which I could just buy 3 very expensive squads (bombers, artillery), making infantry or light vehicles obsolete. I rolled thru all missions after that with just 3 bomber squads, wiping out everything in my wake almost without losses and with nothing to spend those "PR"s on anymore I found a pathfinding bug - in mission 3 (snow, with a highly saturated blue river), if you have any unit next to a passage to the south of the river at the map's bottom edge, the unit won't be able to move through that passage unless it already stands at the beginning of the passage. Same with crossing of bridges. Because of this mission 3 takes much longer to complete, as every ground unit has to spend a full turn to just come up to bridge, and then cross it in the next turn. [table][tr][th][i]I'm a Steam curator, you can [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43946907-Friendly-Nerd/]follow me[/url][/i][/th][/tr][/table]