The best squad tactics games of the 1990s

Two games from 1988 are the roots of everything on this page, and neither looks like much today.

Laser Squad (Target Games, published by Blade Software) is Julian Gollop's turn-based squad game for 8-bit home computers, and X-COM began life as its planned sequel. Wasteland (Interplay Productions, published by Electronic Arts) put a squad of Desert Rangers in the American Southwest after a nuclear war, and when Interplay could not use the name again it made Fallout instead. One root grew into the alien invasion branch of the family, the other into the wasteland branch.

The early nineties belong to real time, because that is what the hardware and the mouse made obvious.

Syndicate (Bullfrog Productions, published by Electronic Arts, 1993) gives you four cyborg agents and a world to take over for a corporation, city by city, with no turns anywhere. Cannon Fodder (Sensible Software, published by Virgin Interactive, 1993) is the cruellest joke of the decade: a tiny squad of named recruits, and a hill of graves outside the recruiting office that grows with every one you lose. Space Hulk (Electronic Arts, 1993) puts Terminators in the corridors of a derelict ship and rations your ability to pause, which is a design idea nobody has really improved on.

Close Combat (Atomic Games, published by Microsoft, 1996) is the one that still surprises people. Its soldiers panic, flee and refuse orders when a fight turns bad, in 1996, which is earlier than most players think that idea existed.

Syndicate Wars (Bullfrog, 1996) moved the original into 3D with destructible cities, and is worth looking at for how early that was.

X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994) is the game this whole genre is a conversation with. A globe with a clock on it, bases to build, research to fund, nations judging your results, and underneath it a turn-based fight where every action spends time units and the dead stay dead.

Its sequels are a mixed set. X-COM: Terror from the Deep (MicroProse, 1995) is the same game underwater and harder, often unfairly so. X-COM: Apocalypse (Mythos Games, 1997) is the interesting failure: one city, politics between factions, and combat you could run in real time with a pause, five years before that became the standard way to make this kind of game.

Jagged Alliance (Madlab Software, published by Sir-Tech, 1995) invented the other half of the genre's economy: you do not command an army, you hire individuals by the day, and they have opinions. Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games (Sir-Tech, 1996) cut it into separate missions and added multiplayer bidding wars over the best mercenaries, which is a better idea than it sounds.

Soldiers at War (Random Games, published by SSI, 1998) tried the same thing with a Second World War squad of eight picked from thirty-two soldiers who remember their missions. It is the weakest game named on this page and the clearest evidence that the formula is harder than it looks.

Fallout (Interplay Productions, 1997) and Fallout 2 (Black Isle Studios, published by Interplay, 1998) are not squad tactics games, and they matter here anyway. They fixed the look, the tone and the character system that the wasteland side of the genre still uses, and they did it while refusing to be kind to the player.

Baldur's Gate (BioWare, published by Interplay, 1998) is on this page for one reason: it made real time with pause the normal way to run a party fight, and every real-time tactics game since has been working inside the expectation it set.

Incubation: Time Is Running Out (Blue Byte, 1997) deserves a mention as an early 3D turn-based squad game that still reads clearly, which is more than most of its contemporaries manage.

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios, published by Eidos Interactive, 1998) invented real-time stealth tactics outright: six specialists, hand-built levels, visible vision cones, and guards who raise the alarm when they find a body. Its expansion, Beyond the Call of Duty (1999), is harder and adds ways to handle guards without killing them.

Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) is the other peak, and the one with the longest tail. An island of sectors, mercenaries with contracts and tempers, mines that pay a daily income, militia you train to hold what you took, and a combat model that is still being extended by a community patch twenty-seven years later.

Around those two: Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate (Random Games, SSI, 1998) carries losses between missions. Gorky 17 (Metropolis Software, published by Monolith, 1999) is a short, strange, well-made turn-based game about NATO soldiers in a Polish town. Abomination: The Nemesis Project (Hothouse Creations, published by Eidos, 1999) runs a squad through a plague-emptied America in real time with a pause. Shadow Company: Left for Dead (Sinister Games, published by Ubi Soft, 1999) is early 3D mercenary work that has not aged well.

By 1999 the arguments were over and the answers are the ones still in use: a budget of action points per unit, permanent death, a strategy layer that gives a mission consequences, enemy vision drawn so the player can plan around it, and real time with a pause as a legitimate alternative to turns rather than a cheap substitute.

What the decade did not solve is the thing it was best at hiding: all of this is brutally hard to produce. Of the companies that made the four best games named here, Mythos Games closed in 2001, Sir-Tech Canada went bankrupt in 2003, Interplay spent the next decade coming apart, and only Pyro Studios made it out with the line intact.

If you are going back to this decade for the first time, the order that works is Commandos, then X-COM, then Jagged Alliance 2, and Fallout alongside any of them for the world rather than the fighting.

Commandos first because its levels are the most immediately legible. X-COM second because the campaign is what makes the fights matter. Jagged Alliance 2 last because it is the deepest and the least forgiving about its interface, and because once it has you, nothing after it is quite enough.