Games like Fallout Tactics: post-apocalyptic squad tactics

Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (Micro Forte, published by 14 Degrees East, 2001) took the rules of a role-playing game, handed you six soldiers instead of one, and let you choose whether a fight ran in turns or in continuous time. Its own series never did that again, and almost nobody else did either.

So the honest answer to what is like it depends on which half you came for. If you want the wasteland, the scarcity and the character sheet, one set of games delivers. If you want a squad, a map and a fight you have to read, a different set delivers. A small number manage both, and they are the ones to try first.

Six rules, taken from the game itself. Very little keeps all six.

Wasteland (Interplay Productions, published by Electronic Arts, 1988) is the root of all of this. It put a squad of Desert Rangers in the American Southwest after a nuclear war, and when Interplay could not use the name for a sequel it made Fallout instead. Going back to Wasteland is going upstream of the whole family.

Wasteland 2 (inXile Entertainment, published by Deep Silver, 2014) is the sequel that eventually arrived, twenty-six years later, with a turn-based squad of four in Arizona. Wasteland 3 (inXile, Deep Silver, 2020) is the better of the two and the closest thing on this list to what Fallout Tactics was doing: a squad of six, a base you come back to, an armoured truck, and fights decided by position and action points rather than reflexes. It is turn-based only, which is the one thing it will not give you.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (The Bearded Ladies, published by Funcom, 2018) is the cleverest answer anyone has given to the tempo question since 2001. You move around a ruined Sweden in real time, sneaking, scouting and picking off a straggler, and the moment a fight starts the game drops into turns. It is not continuous turn-based, but it is the same instinct: let the player do the slow thinking where it matters and keep walking where it does not.

Miasma Chronicles (The Bearded Ladies, published by 505 Games, 2023) is the same studio doing the same thing in a ruined America, with a young man and his robot brother. If you liked the first one you will recognise every system in the second.

ATOM RPG (Atom Team, 2018) is the most direct tribute anyone has made to Fallout 1 and 2: the same view, the same kind of character sheet, the same black humour, moved to the Soviet Union after an alternate nuclear war. It exists because a small group decided to rebuild a 1998 game properly rather than modernise it.

Encased (Dark Crystal Games, published by Prime Matter, 2021) puts the formula under an alien dome in the 1970s, with a party and turn-based fights. Underrail (Stygian Software, 2015) moves it into the metro tunnels beneath a dead surface and has the deepest character building of anything here, along with a difficulty curve that has stopped a lot of people halfway.

The Fall: Last Days of Gaia (Silver Style Entertainment, published by Deep Silver, 2004) is the forgotten German attempt at the same thing in 3D, played in real time with pause. Kenshi (Lo-Fi Games, 2018) is the strangest and least forgiving wasteland on this page: you control a squad in real time with a pause, you start as nobody, and nothing in the world is scaled to you or interested in whether you live.

Urban Strife (White Pond Games, published by MicroProse) is the closest living relative of Fallout Tactics, and the one most people asking this question have not heard of. It is turn-based squad tactics with action points, set in a ruined corner of the American South, with a shelter to rebuild, factions to deal with and zombie hordes that move around the map on their own rather than waiting in rooms for you. It went into Steam early access on 10 December 2024 and reached its 1.0 release on 14 July 2026. Steam reviews sit at 69 per cent positive out of 657, which reads about right: the ambition is bigger than the polish.

Dead State (DoubleBear Productions and Iron Tower Studio, 2014) is a zombie apocalypse in a small Texas town, with a shelter full of survivors to keep fed and turn-based fights outside it. The management half is as hard as the combat half, and the game is honest about how unpleasant that gets.

The Last Spell (Ishtar Games, published by The Arcade Crew, 2023) keeps the turn-based combat and the permanent loss and throws out the exploration: build by day, hold the walls by night. Rebuild 3: Gangs of Deadsville (Northway Games, 2015) and They Are Billions (Numantian Games, 2019) are both further from tactics and closer to management, the first turn by turn and the second in real time with a pause you will use constantly.

Continuous turn-based is the thing Fallout Tactics did that the rest of the genre walked past. Everyone acts at once, action points refill with time at a rate set by agility, and the player can stop the clock to give orders. The rules do not change between that mode and the turn-based ones. That last part is the hard bit, and it is why so few games have tried.

The nearest attempts came out of the Jagged Alliance side of the family. Brigade E5: New Jagged Union (Apeiron, published by 1C Company in Russia and Strategy First in North America, 2005) and its sequel 7.62: High Calibre (Apeiron, 1C Company, 2007) run on what they call smart pause: real time that stops itself whenever something happens you would want to know about. Jagged Alliance: Back in Action (Coreplay, published by bitComposer Games and Kalypso Media, 2012) replaced turns outright with a pausable real time called Plan and Go, which is still the thing most of its reviews argue about.

Broken Lines (PortaPlay, published by Super.com, 2020) does it in planned spans: you issue orders, then watch about half a minute of real time play out. Aliens: Dark Descent (Tindalos Interactive, published by Focus Entertainment, 2023) runs a marine squad in real time with slow motion, stress that accumulates and death that sticks, and is the best recent argument that a tactics game does not need turns to be careful.

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, and the reason to play it is that almost every wall can be shot through or blown apart. Nothing post-apocalyptic on this list destroys a building as well.

Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) and Jagged Alliance 3 (Haemimont Games, published by THQ Nordic, 2023) give you the squad, the payroll and the scarcity without the wasteland. XCOM 2 (Firaxis Games, published by 2K, 2016) gives you the squad and the permanent loss with a tighter, faster fight and far less character sheet. Gorky 17 (Metropolis Software, published by Monolith Productions, 1999) is a short, strange turn-based game about NATO soldiers in a Polish town, worth the two evenings it takes.

One to be careful with. Broken Roads (Drop Bear Bytes, 2024) promised post-apocalyptic Australia with a morality system and turn-based combat, and reads on paper like a direct answer to this question. It landed at 61 on Metacritic with game-breaking bugs reported at launch, and the studio went into administration in February 2025. It is here because leaving it out would misrepresent what this genre looks like from the inside: these games are hard to make, and most of the studios that try are small.

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.

What this page is really a list of is the work already done on one question: how do you let a player think carefully about a fight that is already moving. Fallout Tactics answered it in 2001 and the industry mostly changed the subject. The games above are the ones that did not.