The best squad tactics games of the 2010s

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, published by 2K, 2012) is the hinge. It took the 1994 design, cut it down hard, and made the result legible to people who had never played anything like it: two actions per soldier, a squad of four growing to six, cover as a percentage on the screen, and a base drawn as a cutaway ant farm.

Plenty of people who loved the original hated what was removed. Both reactions are correct, and neither matters next to the commercial fact: it sold, and because it sold, the rest of this page got made. The other cause was Kickstarter and Steam, which between them let a studio of three people fund and sell a game to an audience of a few hundred thousand without asking a publisher's permission.

The Bureau: XCOM Declassified (2K Marin, 2013) is the road not taken, and a useful warning. It is the same licence as a third-person shooter where you slow time to issue orders to two agents, and it is the only game on this page nobody asks for a sequel to.

Xenonauts (Goldhawk Interactive, 2014) is the restatement: the original X-COM's time units, inventory and unforgiving globe, set in an alternate 1979, with an interface built this century. If what you wanted was 1994 without the pain of running 1994, this is it.

Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019) is Julian Gollop's own return to the thing he invented, with enemies that mutate in response to how you kill them, three rival human factions with their own agendas, and free aiming at body parts instead of a single to-hit roll. It is ambitious and uneven, and the ideas in it are worth more than its polish.

XCOM 2 (Firaxis Games, 2016) answered its own predecessor. The aliens won the first war, you run a resistance from a stolen ship, and almost every mission has a turn limit, specifically to stop the careful, overwatch-crawling play the first game rewarded. It is the better game of the two and the more stressful by design.

Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun (Mimimi Productions, published by Daedalic, 2016) is the single best thing that happened to the genre in this decade. Five assassins in Edo-period Japan, hand-built levels, vision cones you can read at a glance, and a quality of level design that bears comparison with Commandos 2. It reopened a line that had been closed for ten years.

Around it: Invisible, Inc. (Klei Entertainment, 2015) makes turn-based espionage out of a rising alarm level and a clock on the whole campaign, and is one of the tightest designs of the decade. Satellite Reign (5 Lives Studios, 2015) is the Syndicate successor, in an open cyberpunk city, with agents whose bodies can be replaced. Door Kickers (KillHouse Games, 2014) strips the idea to its skeleton: a SWAT team from directly overhead, routes drawn on a paused map, then everyone goes at once.

This is where the lasting work is, and the studio sizes are not a detail.

Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018) is two people. Three mechs, an eight-by-eight grid, and every enemy attack shown to you before it happens, so losing is always your mistake. It is the most elegant tactics game ever made and takes twenty minutes to learn.

Battle Brothers (Overhype Studios, 2017) is three people. A mercenary company on an open map, taking contracts for coin, with men who get maimed and die for good, and no story to protect you from the arithmetic. Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016) made stress a real currency and proved that a party game can be about recovery between fights as much as the fights. Frozen Synapse (Mode 7, 2011) had both sides plan in secret and execute simultaneously, which remains the purest competitive version of this genre.

Underrail (Stygian Software, 2015) is essentially one person's life's work: a Fallout-like in metro tunnels with character building deep enough to ruin a run in the first hour. Kenshi (Lo-Fi Games, 2018) is a vast indifferent wasteland where you start as nobody and control a squad in real time with a pause. RimWorld (Ludeon Studios, 2018) is a colony game with a storyteller AI that aims disasters at you, and the best generator of specific personal stories in any strategy game.

Wasteland 2 (inXile Entertainment, published by Deep Silver, 2014) brought the Desert Rangers back twenty-six years after the original and was the first big Kickstarter proof that the audience was there. Shadowrun Returns (Harebrained Schemes, 2013) was the same kind of proof a year earlier, in a smaller and tidier game.

ATOM RPG (Atom Team, 2018) moves Fallout's rules and tone to the Soviet Union after an alternate nuclear war and is more faithful to 1997 than anything else on this list. Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (The Bearded Ladies, published by Funcom, 2018) is the decade's cleanest new idea: sneak in real time, pick who to ambush, then fight in turns. The Age of Decadence (Iron Tower Studio, 2015) is a fallen-empire game where talking is as deadly as fighting and most paths through it kill you.

On the zombie side, Dead State (DoubleBear Productions and Iron Tower Studio, 2014) is the serious attempt: a Texas shelter to keep fed, noise as the enemy, and the other survivors as the real problem. Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville (Northway Games, 2015) takes a city back block by block. They Are Billions (Numantian Games, 2019) does the horde at colony scale, in real time with a pause you will hold down constantly.

BattleTech (Harebrained Schemes, published by Paradox, 2018) is a mercenary company of giant walking tanks with monthly bills and salvage to fight over, and the strategy layer is the reason to play it. Mordheim: City of the Damned (Rogue Factor, 2015) gives warbands permanent injuries and a campaign that remembers them. Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus (Bulwark Studios, 2018) builds turns out of accumulating knowledge instead of action points, which is genuinely new. Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Ubisoft Milan and Paris, 2017) is the XCOM model made friendly and is better designed than anyone expected.

Hard West (CreativeForge Games, 2015) deserves its own line for making luck a resource that dodges bullets and then runs out. Phantom Doctrine (CreativeForge, 2018) runs a Cold War spy agency with an investigation board of pins and string. The Banner Saga (Stoic, published by Versus Evil, 2014) is a Norse caravan fleeing the end of the world where the choices kill people you like.

Three things stuck, and all three are still being argued about on this site.

Numbers went on the screen. The percentage chance over an enemy's head is XCOM's legacy more than any mechanic, and it changed what players consider fair.

The mind became a system. Darkest Dungeon's stress meter did more to spread morale mechanics than the thirty years of panic rolls before it.

The campaign got shorter. Into the Breach and the run-based games showed you could keep the tactics and throw away the hundred-hour commitment, and a lot of the 2020s followed them.

Into the Breach, tonight, whatever else you do. It is cheap, it is perfect, and it will teach you more about how a tactics fight is built than any essay.

Then XCOM 2 for the campaign, Shadow Tactics for the level design, and Battle Brothers when you want a game that will not be nice to you. Keep Darkest Dungeon for a month when you are feeling resilient.