Strain Tactics

Hours played at review time, across 41 reviews with recorded playtime.

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

If I had just one word to describe this game, it would be "clunky" Its not just because of the mobile-derived interface that has your mouse constantly ping-ponging between every edge of the screen just to achieve basic gameplay tasks. as many others have mentioned, rather, there is an overall feeling of discontinuity felt in several areas that makes the game feel cumbersome to play. Here are just some of the things that make the game feel just straight up unpolished and bad: Even within the first mission its clear that the game's sandbox is bloated with a number of redundant consumable items, there are at least a dozen whose only feature is healing a small amount (something which is already free in your helicopter that you can retreat to at any time), serving only to take up space. Lines of sight are utterly unclear. I honestly cant even tell if this game uses a fog of war system, room-based vision, or traditional vision cones as there is little visual distinction between visible and obscured terrain. There are zero tooltips for items on the ground, you have to pick them up to see what they are. A lot of basic information throughout the game is either completely withheld or held hostage behind obfuscating interfaces. The overall visual language of the game is cluttered and difficult to read. Some background elements serve as movement-obstructing terrain where others do not with little to no visual distinction. The real time with pause element causes problems in some areas with chopper deployment not properly updating its zones while paused. Player unit movement is unreliable, with soldiers taking random detours (even without the effects of stress) and walking into hazards. Movement speeds between player units vary DRASTICALLY, where having any reasonable amount of equipment causes them to be utterly sluggish, and being only lightly armed turns them into the flash, making unit cohesion impossible unless taking tiny bite-sized steps one at a time. Inventory management is simply painful, exfiltrating items requires manually ferrying them from the ground to your heli, often one at a time. The game will literally just spawn enemies directly on top of friendly units inside your base for some reason. Many vendors in your base just spit your items onto the ground forcing you to manually make space in a soldiers inventory to pick them up and carry them back. Others interface directly with your chopper's inventory so its clearly possible to make it convenient. Tutorialization is fragmented as hell, there are like 4 different "NPCs" and a menu button who all direct you to different amounts and versions of the same 6 pieces of information. Yet somehow none of them can answer the questions I actually have like where to spend my R-coins, or if infection is a visible status effect or invisible thus requiring preventative action. Most of the soldiers you can purchase are pretty much useless as they trade nearly all of their health and inventory space for stats that seem to have little effect. (Why would I want to have a guy who runs fast and dies in one hit in a game about where every engagement is about hunkering down and just shooting everything that approaches?) The real-time gunship support element is genuinely innovative but is made incredibly janky by the weird decision to make tree canopies block literally all munitions, and enemy movement being so erratic that you could never hit anything that isn't completely immobile. Overall this game has some interesting ideas that should have made for a much more cohesive and fascinating title, but in reality boiled down into a confusing sluggish mess that fails to deliver a meaningful strategic challenge.