The best squad tactics games of the 2020s so far

The shape of the 2020s is easy to miss while you are inside it. The genre is no longer a revival or a niche being kept alive by two or three studios. It is a steady output of a dozen or more games a year, nearly all from small teams, with the big publishers appearing only when a licence is attached.

That is a healthier position than the genre has ever been in, and it comes with a specific loss, which this page gets to in a moment.

Desperados III (Mimimi Games, published by THQ Nordic, 2020) is the most polished real-time stealth tactics game that exists. A gang of five in the West, levels that can be solved several ways, and a showdown mode for planning simultaneous actions that finally makes the hardest trick in the genre comfortable. If you play one game from this decade, play this.

Partisans 1941 (Alter Games, published by Daedalic, 2020) is the rougher cousin, with Soviet partisans behind German lines and a forest camp to keep supplied between missions, and the camp is the interesting part. Shadow Gambit: The Cursed Crew (Mimimi Games, 2023) is the studio's last game: undead pirates with supernatural powers and a crew you assemble yourself, and it is the most freely structured game of the line.

Then the loss. On 29 August 2023, twelve days after Shadow Gambit came out, Mimimi's founders announced they were closing the studio. The reason given was not a commercial failure but the toll fifteen years of increasingly ambitious games had taken. Three of the best games in this genre's history came from that team, and there will not be a fourth.

The line continues without them. Commandos: Origins (Claymore Game Studios, published by Kalypso, 2025) is a new studio's prequel to the original. Door Kickers 2: Task Force North (KillHouse Games, 2025) moves the overhead planning game to military operations abroad and is as sharp as its predecessor.

Jagged Alliance 3 (Haemimont Games, published by THQ Nordic, 2023) is the real sequel, twenty-four years after the last one: an African country, a missing president, sectors to hold, and many of the original mercenaries with their old voices and their old opinions of each other. After two decades of licensed attempts that missed the point, this one did not.

Wartales (Shiro Games, 2023) is the open-world version: a mercenary band wandering a plague-emptied map, with wages to pay and prisoners to put to work, and no story pulling you anywhere. Expeditions: Rome (Logic Artists, published by THQ Nordic, 2022) runs a legate's campaign with companions to lead and a legion to manage, and is the best of that studio's three Expeditions games.

Wasteland 3 (inXile Entertainment, published by Deep Silver, 2020) is the strongest of the modern Desert Rangers games: frozen Colorado, a squad of six, a base and an armoured truck, and a tone that is willing to be funny without stopping being bleak.

Encased (Dark Crystal Games, published by Prime Matter, 2021) is a 1970s research zone under an alien dome, built closely on the first two Fallout games. Miasma Chronicles (The Bearded Ladies, published by 505 Games, 2023) is the same studio's follow-up to Mutant Year Zero, with the same real-time sneaking into turn-based ambush, in a ruined America. The Last Spell (Ishtar Games, published by The Arcade Crew, 2023) keeps only the siege: build by day, hold the walls by night, heroes who do not come back.

On the zombie side specifically, the notable release of the decade is Urban Strife (White Pond Games, published by MicroProse), which is the most direct attempt at action-point squad tactics in a zombie apocalypse. It entered early access on 10 December 2024 and reached 1.0 on 14 July 2026.

Three games this decade have tried to change what a turn is, and all three are worth your attention more than most of the polished ones.

Broken Lines (PortaPlay, published by Super.com, 2020) splits combat into planned spans of real time: you give orders to eight soldiers, then watch eight seconds happen, and you cannot intervene while they do. Phantom Brigade (Tetragon Works, published by Brace Yourself Games, 2023) shows you the next five seconds of enemy movement on a timeline and lets you plan your mechs' actions through it, which makes every exchange a prediction problem. Aliens: Dark Descent (Tindalos Interactive, published by Focus, 2023) runs in real time with slow motion, keeps your marines' stress and wounds between missions, and makes leaving a map early a legitimate decision rather than a failure.

Tactical Breach Wizards (Suspicious Developments, 2024) belongs here too, for the opposite reason: every move can be freely undone until you commit, which removes the dice and the regret and leaves a pure puzzle. It should not work as well as it does.

XCOM: Chimera Squad (Firaxis Games, 2020) is a small spin-off about a mixed human and alien police squad, with interleaved turns instead of side-by-side ones, and it is better than its budget suggests. Marvel's Midnight Suns (Firaxis, 2022) replaces action points with a hand of cards and an abbey to live in, and is the most divisive game the studio has made.

Warhammer 40,000: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters (Complex Games, published by Frontier Foundry, 2022) is built closely on XCOM 2 and is the best Warhammer tactics game yet made. Necromunda: Underhive Wars (Rogue Factor, 2020) has the right ideas about verticality and lasting injuries and does not quite land them. Gears Tactics (Splash Damage and The Coalition, 2020) drops the grid and gives three actions a soldier, which makes it faster and more aggressive than its model. Othercide (Lightbulb Crew, 2020) is black-and-white turn-based horror where healing one soldier means sacrificing another.

Hard West 2 (Ice Code Games, 2022) refills a shooter's action points on every kill, so a good turn becomes a chain. Fort Triumph (CookieByte Entertainment, 2020) lets you kick an enemy into a tree so the tree falls on someone else, which is the whole game and a good one. Xenonauts 2 (Goldhawk Interactive, published by Hooded Horse, 2026) is the newest game named on this page: the faithful X-COM rebuilt in 3D with a new alternate Cold War.

There has been no mainline XCOM since 2016. The studio that made the two best real-time stealth games of the decade closed in 2023. Nobody has shipped a serious successor to Silent Storm's destruction model in twenty-three years, and real time with pause, which Fallout Tactics offered in 2001, is still rare enough that each game using it gets described as unusual.

That is what a healthy genre actually looks like from the inside: plenty being made, and the most interesting roads still mostly empty.

Desperados III if you want the best-made game of the decade. Jagged Alliance 3 if you want the deepest one. Aliens: Dark Descent if you want to see what real time with a slowed clock can do to tension. Tactical Breach Wizards if you have an evening and want to be delighted.

And if you want to know where this studio is looking: RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows, real time with pause, set after a collapse, with zombies and with factions fighting over what is left. It is in development, and we are not going to describe anything in it that is not finished. The gaps in the list above are not an accident of what we chose to write down.