Recommendations

Tactics games for beginners: where to start

Most people who bounce off this genre bounce off it for the same two reasons, and neither is difficulty. They start with the wrong game, and nobody told them the three habits that separate losing from winning.

A squad tactics game asks you to move a small group of people around a map, one decision at a time, against an enemy who is allowed to kill them permanently. That is all. It is not a genre that requires fast hands or memorised builds, which is why people who dislike most games often like these.

What it does require is patience with a particular kind of frustration, and the frustration is much easier to take if your first game is one that explains itself.

The four best first games

Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018). Start here, genuinely. Three mechs on a small grid, and the game shows you every enemy attack before it happens, so there is no luck and nothing hidden. A run takes under an hour. Everything you learn in it transfers to games ten times its size, and it costs less than a sandwich.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, published by 2K, 2012). The friendliest of the big ones. Two actions per soldier, a squad of six, a base to build between missions, and the odds on any shot printed over the target's head. Set the difficulty to normal, turn off the permanent-death campaign mode if it is offered, and let it teach you.

Mario and Rabbids Kingdom Battle (Ubisoft Milan and Paris, 2017). A real recommendation. It is the XCOM structure with the cruelty removed, and it teaches positioning, flanking and movement better than most games aimed at adults.

Invisible, Inc. (Klei Entertainment, 2015) if you would rather sneak than shoot. Turn-based burglary with a rising alarm, short missions, and a clock on the whole campaign so you are never bored.

The three habits that make it click

Almost every new player loses for one of these reasons, and all three are fixable in an evening.

Move one unit at a time, and stop moving the moment you see something. The commonest beginner mistake is spending the whole squad's movement before knowing what is on the map. Send one person forward, look, then decide with the other five.
Do not take the shot you can take; take the shot you can take next turn from better ground. A 55 per cent shot now is usually worse than a 90 per cent shot after one more move, and the difference compounds over twenty turns.
Retreating is a move. Most of these games let you leave, pull back, or break off, and new players almost never do it. The squad that walks away with one wound intact is the squad that still exists in mission nine.

What to save for later

These are not worse games. Two of them are the best in the genre. They are simply terrible first experiences.

Jagged Alliance 2 (Sir-Tech Canada, 1999) is the deepest game of its kind and it will not explain a single thing to you. Its interface is from 1999 and its hiring, inventory and militia systems all assume you already know what you are doing. Play it third or fourth, and play it with the community patch.

Darkest Dungeon (Red Hook Studios, 2016) is punishing in a way that is specifically psychological, and losing a favourite character to stress rather than to a mistake is a hard thing to take when you are still learning what a mistake is.

Silent Storm (Nival Interactive, 2003) and 7.62: High Calibre (Apeiron, 2007) are both brilliant and both assume a tolerance for rough edges and untranslated menus. Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019) is full of ideas and short on guidance. Battle Brothers (Overhype Studios, 2017) will let you build a company that cannot survive the mid-game and will not warn you.

And X-COM: UFO Defense (Mythos Games and MicroProse, 1994), the game that started all of it, is an awful place to begin. Play Xenonauts (Goldhawk Interactive, 2014) instead, which is the same design with a modern interface, and come back to the original later out of respect.

If you want a story more than a challenge

Wasteland 3 (inXile Entertainment, published by Deep Silver, 2020) is a squad role-playing game first and a tactics game second, and the fights are forgiving enough to carry you through on the writing alone.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden (The Bearded Ladies, published by Funcom, 2018) lets you sneak around in real time, choose exactly which fight to start, and then take it in turns. Choosing your own fights is the gentlest on-ramp in the genre.

The Banner Saga (Stoic, published by Versus Evil, 2014) and Shadowrun Returns (Harebrained Schemes, 2013) are both short, beautiful and built to be finished.

Things nobody tells you

Losing a soldier is usually not a reason to reload. These games are designed around loss, and a campaign where someone died and you carried on is nearly always a better experience than one you kept perfect by starting over. The genre's whole emotional range lives on the other side of letting a bad thing stand.

The hard difficulty is not the real game. In almost every game here, the standard setting is the one the designers balanced and tested most. The harder ones are for a second run.

If a game has a strategy layer, the layer is the game. The screen between missions, with the research and the roster and the money on it, is not an interruption of the fighting. It is what the fighting was for, and learning to think about it is what turns a run of missions into a campaign.

Where we come into this

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.

We have read a lot of reviews from people who were new to this genre and did not get past the second mission, and the complaint is almost never that the game was too hard. It is that they could not tell what the game wanted. That is a solvable problem and we treat it as one.