Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel is a squad tactics game set in the American Midwest in the year 2197, long after a nuclear war. The player leads a squad of soldiers from the Brotherhood of Steel, a military order that reclaims and develops the technology the old world left behind. The campaign begins near the ruins of Chicago and pushes west toward the Rocky Mountains, one mission at a time. Between missions the squad returns to a Brotherhood bunker to resupply, repair gear, heal, and take its next briefing.

Each mission sends the squad into a town, a factory, a military encampment, or one of the underground vaults, with a map that marks the objectives. There is little conversation and a great deal of fighting. The player starts as a new recruit commanding other recruits, and the soldiers who join the squad can be human, ghoul, super mutant, deathclaw, dog, or robot, each with its own strengths and limits. A mission is a small problem to solve with the people you brought.

What set it apart was timing. The two role-playing games before it in the series ran combat one character at a time. This one offers three modes, chosen in the settings. In individual turns, each character acts in order. In squad turns, one side moves its whole squad and then the other side answers. In continuous turn-based, everyone acts at once, and each character's action points, the budget spent on moving and shooting, refill over time at a rate set by agility.

Continuous turn-based was the idea that carried over. It kept the action points and stats of the turn-based games but let them recover with time, so a whole squad could act together without anyone waiting for a turn, and the player could pause to give orders and then let the clock run. It was not the first game to pause real-time combat; role-playing games such as Baldur's Gate had done it in 1998. What Fallout Tactics did was set that way of playing beside two turn-based alternatives, built on the same action points, in a squad game organized around missions.

The details around it mattered as much. Characters could change stance, height changed the odds of a shot, and a character set to sentry would open fire on its own the moment an enemy appeared, so a squad kept fighting between orders. It was also the first game in its series with multiplayer, where each player spent a pool of points on a squad and its gear and then fought other players.

Its reception was divided. Reviewers were generally warm, and the game holds a Metacritic score of 82. Many Fallout fans were not: they objected that it was linear compared with the earlier games and gave up open-ended role-playing for combat, and some said it was not a real Fallout game at all. Its reputation has improved among players who judge it as a tactics game, though it is still often ranked below the role-playing games in its own series.

RAD Tactics is a post-apocalyptic squad tactics game for Windows PCs, real-time with pause, and it is in development. Fallout Tactics is a relative in genre and in the problem it worked on, not in any shared property. RAD Tactics has no connection to the Fallout license, its world, or its factions, and nothing on this page should be read that way. What the two share is a way of playing: a small group, a dangerous place, and orders given under pressure.

Every squad tactics game has to solve the same problem: the player is commanding several people at once, and the player's attention is the scarce resource. Fallout Tactics answered it by letting the player choose the tempo and keeping the rules constant underneath. It shows that real time and careful thought can share a game. We study how it did that because the problem does not change when the setting does.

The moment we remember is a squad crossing open ground in continuous time, when one soldier set to sentry opens fire on something nobody else had spotted. Everyone is acting at once. Stopping the clock then, to work out who is exposed, who holds the high ground, and who is out of action points, is the game at its best. The fight is already moving, and the player has to catch up with it on purpose.

We also like that the player decides how much of a fight to hand over to the clock. Some missions suit speed. Others suit slow, character-by-character turns, because the squad is worth the extra minutes. A hard fight earns its careful turns; a walk through ground already cleared does not need them. Both are the same game underneath, and the choice stays with the player.