Abomination: The Nemesis Project

Abomination is a 1999 real-time tactics game from the British studio Hothouse Creations. A plague has killed most of the population of the United States within days. Most survivors have joined a violent apocalyptic cult called the Faithful, and the plague is turning into something larger: a single organism spreading across the country. You command a team of eight genetically altered soldiers sent to stop it.

Missions take place in the ruins of an American city. The game runs in real time, and you can pause it at any moment to give each soldier orders. The campaign is a race against the spread of the organism.

It is one of the few games of its era to try what X-COM: Apocalypse tried, real-time squad combat with a pause inside a strategic campaign, and it does so in a setting that is close to the end of the world. The premise, a dead country, a cult and a growing organism, is stronger than most games of its kind.

It is rough, and its interface and pathfinding are of their time. Play it as a piece of history and as evidence that real time with pause and the post-apocalypse were tried together long before now.

Abomination takes X-COM's structure, a team, a campaign and an enemy that grows while you work, and plays the fights in real time with a pause instead of in turns. The enemy is not invaders from space but something born on Earth, which makes it closer in mood to a zombie story than to an alien war.