Laser Squad

Laser Squad is a turn-based tactics game first released for the ZX Spectrum in 1988 and ported to several other home computers of the time. It was made by Julian Gollop and his small team at Target Games, the studio that later became Mythos Games. Each scenario gives you a handful of soldiers on a top-down map and a single objective: kill a target, rescue someone, retrieve something, or wipe out the other side.

Soldiers move one at a time and spend action points on everything they do: walking, turning, shooting, picking things up. Before a scenario starts you buy their weapons and armour from a fixed budget, so the fight is partly decided in the shop. Units that keep some points back can fire during the enemy's turn when a target walks into view.

It is the clearest look at the X-COM rules before the campaign was wrapped around them. Action points, facing, line of sight, reaction fire and the shop before the mission are all here, at a size you can take in at once. The scenarios are short, the maps are small, and losing a soldier still matters because there are so few.

It is also a museum piece in the plain sense. The graphics and controls are those of an 8-bit computer, and nobody should expect the interface of a modern game. The best way to meet it today is through an emulator, with the patience that requires.

X-COM began as a pitch for a Laser Squad sequel, which is why the two share so much. What X-COM added was everything around the fight: the globe, the bases, the research and the soldiers who carry over from one mission to the next. Laser Squad is the fight alone, and it shows how much of X-COM's tension was already in place before any of that existed.