USC: Counterforce

Every price cut of more than 20% we have observed, in each market that quoted one, with this game's chart position on either side of it. These are episodes, not a model: a sale is one event, and one event cannot tell you what the next one will do.

For scale, across Steam · Top Sellers · Brazil over the last 30 days: the 26 chart moves that followed a price cut of more than 20% went a median of 7 places towards #1, and the 2,400 moves with no price cut behind them went 2 away. One store, one chart, one country — it is the only place we have enough observations to say even that.

Prices outside the United States have been collected since 6 August 2026 and chart positions since 19 July 2026, so a cut older than that has no market to compare and a market that joined later has no history yet. Nothing here is converted between currencies.

Hours played at review time, across 45 reviews with recorded playtime.

positive critical· bar length = how often the theme comes up

6.5/10 XCom-like TBS in space TLDR: the game is for the uber-hardcore TBS nerds, though much of its difficulty comes from cluttered UI design and poor onboarding. Visuals are polished yet the top-down perspective is just a unfortunate choice. Patient players might still want to check it out at a discount Good: + it has the XCom/JA2 formula at its heart + pretty UI graphics + very nice music + a lot of small interesting stuff like pushing/pulling objects, fully destructible environments, jumping over poison puddles + if you like complexity, it's a very complex game - if only this complexity was introduced gradually and not all at once So-so: +/- the story is too verbose. Just to start the first mission, there is a whole Zoom call with half a dozen characters involved. And nothing interesting is actually said. I mean, we hate that already at our jobs, so games should not try to replicate that. The game desperately needs humor or some kind of life to it. But no, it's just too serious about itself, and you can even see it from the guy on the game's Steam banner. So serious! You don't mess with this guy! +/- the tutorial is long and detailed. The white arrow pointing where to click should be animated because it's often hard to locate it. Still, much of the tutorial is just text, and you forget most of it later. The amount of stuff this game has to teach is just way too much. Instead, the game should have introduced its mechanics more gradually. As it is now, you go thru a whole academy and then, in the very first mission of a campaign, face the whole game's complexity like an impenetrable wall. That's not how even hardcore games should be designed +/- attacks have very small action point cost, so in some cases a character can perform 7-8 precise shots with a sniper rifle in a single turn! Cmon, that's just unrealistic. Also, the enemies are usually bullet sponges. +/- weapons have geometry-based range patterns instead of a circle. So, often an enemy is just 3 tiles away but you can't shoot at it! The only other game where I saw this was Gorky 17, and it was a rather simple RPG-TBS with only 3, sometimes 4 characters in your team. This system doesn't fit the uber-detailed XCom-like simulation here... +/- it's often hard to see which tiles are passable and which aren't, where your soldier can see and walk. There are 3D terrain objects used here but they don't match the tiles all that obviously, also due to dynamic 3D lighting. Maybe this game should have been 2D, with clear pixel graphics +/- while walking, characters have annoying micro-delays at every tile while moving Bad: - top-down view is pretty bad. In fact, I can't recall any successful TBS game with such a view. Even Jagged Alliance 1 had it slightly from the side. Dune 2 was an RTS game almost without infantry, and already C&C and Wacraft 1/2 had units shown at a slight angle. Battle Isle - didn't have humans, just tanks. Templar Battleforce - a bad mobile game that no one should want to copy... With the top-down view, soldiers feel anonymous, too much alike (can't even tell females from males). Soldiers get visually lost in the surrounding gray-ish ground. Small aliens similarly look like gray blobs, with little character to them (big ones are okay). There are boxes that you can shoot over and those that you can't - the difference is impossible to see from above. All this would require a proper 3/4 view angle. Just imagine how crappy JA2 or Fallout 1/2 would look and play in this top-down presentation! - the UI is designed according to the principle "show max amount of stuff possible that the screen space allows". This results is complexity akin to that of controlling a nuclear reactor. The irony is, most of the data shown on the screen you don't even need most of the time. For example, the whole contents of a character's inventory are shown at the bottom as if at a quick action panel (but what is ammo then doing in the quick action panel?). Stats of shots of a weapon are always shown (should have been visible only when you're targeting a weapon). Character stats like resistances and front/rear armor could all go into a character info dialog that you'd bring up with a right click. Tooltips are incredibly long and pile in just about everything possibly related to the thing - to the point that you just don't want to read them - inventory management is counter-intuitive. E.g. to load ammo into a weapon, the most natural way is to drag the ammo item over a gun. But here it's right clicks on buttons. It seems that the dev found out that players were confused in the playtests, so they have those "right-click to equip, _THEN_ right click to load ammo" sentences revealing their frustration with player stupidity. Just don't re-invent obvious designs that have been tested over decades... Put up a ragdoll with slots and a backpack, and it would all be obvious to anyone who played an RPG game before, and the tutorial would shrink a bit - there is a 3D overlay that shows the "1st person view of the selected character" - carries no information and only adds clutter - no tutorial for base management / room construction (I found an encyclopedia article on it hours after I've kinda figured it out thru trial and error) - can't order soldiers to swap places. Which is kinda important cuz most maps are very tight here, and your melee soldier can span in a back row inside an elevator for example - there is a huge encyclopedia, even with videos, that explains many things. But in my first battle I couldn't find an answer to the simple question: how can poison be cured? Can it be? One article says soldiers can "heal themselves". How? I spent all medkits yet the soldiers were still dying. Encyclopedia needs a "search" function like the one in Civ 5. Though again, I'm pretty sure that with a tighter design about 30% of those explanations would not be needed at all [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]