Incubation: Time Is Running Out

Incubation is a 1997 turn-based tactics game from the German studio Blue Byte, and the fourth game in its Battle Isle series. You command a squad of space marines led by Corporal Alexander Bratt in the colonial city of Scay-Hallwa, where an equipment failure has exposed the city to a virus. The native Scay'Ger are turning into monsters, and the squad has to fight its way through.

Battles are played on a grid, one soldier at a time, with action points spent on moving and shooting. Between missions you spend points earned in battle on new weapons, equipment and skills for each marine, so a squad builds up over the campaign. An expansion, The Wilderness Missions, followed in 1998.

It is a tight, well-built squad game that few people outside Germany remember. Together with Bungie's Myth, released the same year, it was one of the first PC strategy games to use hardware-accelerated 3D, and the camera can be moved freely around a battle. The monsters are varied and the missions are designed by hand rather than generated.

There is no strategic layer beyond the upgrades. Each mission follows the last in a fixed order, so it plays more like a series of puzzles with a growing squad than a war you manage.

Incubation keeps X-COM's fight, action points and all, and leaves out the campaign map, the research and the bases. In return it gives each mission more design attention than a generated X-COM map could get. It belongs beside the later games that did the same, such as Silent Storm, which also put the fight first.