The best squad tactics games of the 2000s

The story usually told about the 2000s is that isometric tactics died and then Firaxis revived it in 2012. The first half is nearly true commercially and badly wrong as a description of what was made.

What actually happened is that the genre stopped being a mainstream product and became a European and Russian specialism, and the games got stranger and more technical as a direct result.

Commandos 2: Men of Courage (Pyro Studios, published by Eidos Interactive, 2001) is the high point of the line and arguably of the decade. The maps rotate, you can go inside buildings, the squad gains a thief and a dog, and the levels are the size of small towns. Commandos 3: Destination Berlin (Pyro Studios, 2003) is shorter and louder and a step back, which is worth knowing before you buy the pack.

Spellbound Entertainment spent the decade building the other half of the genre. Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive (published by Infogrames, 2001) moves Commandos to the Wild West with a bounty hunter and five friends chasing a train robber, and is the best of its games. Robin Hood: The Legend of Sherwood (2002) swaps killing for robbing and non-lethal takedowns, which almost nobody tried again until much later. Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge (published by Atari, 2006) goes full 3D and drops the camera to each character's shoulder, and loses some of the clarity that made the first one work.

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (Micro Forte, published by 14 Degrees East, 2001) took the Fallout world and made it about commanding six people instead of being one person. The important thing in it is the mode switch: you can play the same fight in turns, or in continuous turn-based, where everyone acts as their action points refill and the game runs on until you pause it.

That option is the ancestor of everything on the rest of this page and of a good deal of what came after. It was shipped in 2001 and then mostly ignored for twenty years.

This is the part of the decade people have not played, and it is where the real technical work is.

Silent Storm (Nival Interactive, published by JoWooD in Europe and Encore in North America, 2003) is turn-based squad tactics in an alternate Second World War with a destruction model that nothing has really beaten. Almost every wall, floor and roof can be shot through or collapsed, which means cover is a physical object with a thickness rather than a number attached to a tile. Hammer and Sickle (Novik and Co with Nival, published by CDV, 2005) reuses that engine for a Soviet agent in divided Germany in 1949, and is harder and talkier.

Brigade E5: New Jagged Union (Apeiron, published by 1C in Russia and Strategy First in North America, 2005) is where the smart pause comes from: real time that stops itself whenever something happens that you would want to know about. 7.62: High Calibre (Apeiron, published by 1C, 2007) is the better version of it, with an arsenal that borders on the obsessive. Both are rough, both are translated awkwardly, and both model a gunfight more honestly than anything with a hit percentage on the screen.

With MicroProse gone, the succession went to Altar Interactive in the Czech Republic, which made three games in five years.

UFO: Aftermath (2003) rebuilds the formula with real-time-with-pause combat after an alien cloud has killed most of humanity, and is let down by repetitive generated maps. UFO: Aftershock (2005) brings humanity back down to a changed Earth and is the better game. UFO: Afterlight (2007) is the best of the three: a small colony on Mars where every person is needed for a job, so a soldier in the field is a scientist not in a lab.

Meanwhile the man who designed the original was working small. Julian Gollop's Codo Technologies made Laser Squad Nemesis (2002), a multiplayer tactics game played by email where both sides' turns resolve at the same time, and Rebelstar: Tactical Command (published by Namco Hometek and Atari, 2005), which is X-COM on a Game Boy Advance and better than that sounds.

Full Spectrum Warrior (Pandemic Studios, published by THQ, 2004) grew out of a training tool built for the US Army, and its whole argument is that you command two fireteams rather than controlling them. You give positions and suppression, not shots. It is the most unusual game on this page and still worth an evening.

Soldiers: Heroes of World War II (Best Way, published by Codemasters, 2004) and Men of War (Best Way, published by 1C, 2009) simulate a battlefield down to each soldier's pockets and each tank's crew, and let you take direct control of any of them. Valkyria Chronicles (Sega, 2008) spends command points to move one soldier at a time, in third person, under live enemy fire, which makes every advance a physical risk rather than a calculation.

Freedom Force (Irrational Games, published by Electronic Arts and Crave, 2002) and Freedom Force vs the Third Reich (2005) are real time with pause with 1960s comic-book superheroes and a city you can wreck. The Fall: Last Days of Gaia (Silver Style Entertainment, published by Deep Silver, 2004) is a German post-apocalyptic party game that is more interesting than it is good. Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Business (Sir-Tech Canada, 2000) is a standalone set of harder Arulco-adjacent missions with a map editor, and is for people who have already finished the main game twice.

What the 2000s were actually for, looking back, is the three questions the genre is still answering.

Commandos 2 first, because it is the best-made game of the decade and the least dated. Fallout Tactics second if the wasteland is what brought you. Silent Storm third, and give it an hour before you judge the interface, because the destruction is the point and it takes a fight or two to realise how much of it is real.

After those, Valkyria Chronicles if you want something beautiful, 7.62 if you want something merciless, and UFO: Afterlight if what you miss is the campaign screen rather than the shooting.