Recommendations

Tactics games where you can shoot through the walls

Most tactics games treat a wall as a bonus to your defence. A few treat it as a thing made of material, with a thickness, that a bullet either gets through or does not. Those few are worth finding.

There is a real difference between cover you can damage and cover that is simulated, and games get credit for the second when they only do the first.

Damageable cover means the half wall you are crouched behind can be removed, usually by an explosion, after which you are standing in the open. Simulated cover means the game knows what the wall is made of and where it is, and works out whether a particular shot goes through it. Only a handful of games do the second one, and this page is mostly about them.

The one that still has not been beaten

Silent Storm (Nival Interactive, published by JoWooD in Europe and Encore in North America, 2003) is the answer to this question and has been for twenty-three years. Almost every wall, floor, roof and staircase in its houses can be shot through or collapsed. You can drop a soldier through a ceiling, shoot a man through two rooms of plasterboard, or simply remove the building an enemy sniper is in.

The important part is that none of this is scripted. The destruction comes out of a model of what things are made of, which means it works everywhere and produces situations no designer placed. If you only play one game from this page, play this one, and give it a fight or two before you judge its interface.

Hammer and Sickle (Novik and Co with Nival Interactive, published by CDV, 2005) runs the same engine on a spy story in divided Germany in 1949, and is harder and talkier.

The simulation school

Soldiers: Heroes of World War II (Best Way, published by Codemasters, 2004) and Men of War (Best Way, published by 1C, 2009) model the battlefield down to each tank's crew and each soldier's pockets, and the cover behaves accordingly: sandbags, fences, walls and vehicles all stop different things, and most of them stop being cover once they have been hit enough.

Brigade E5: New Jagged Union (Apeiron, 2005) and 7.62: High Calibre (Apeiron, published by 1C, 2007) care more about the shot itself than the scenery, but they belong here because they resolve a bullet as a thing travelling through a world rather than as a dice roll against a defence number. Both are rough and awkwardly translated, and both are honest in a way almost nothing since has matched.

Syndicate Wars (Bullfrog Productions, published by Electronic Arts, 1996) deserves its place for era alone: a fully 3D city in 1996 where most of the buildings and street furniture could be reduced to rubble while four agents walked through it.

The modern games that do some of it

XCOM: Enemy Unknown (Firaxis Games, published by 2K, 2012) and XCOM 2 (Firaxis, 2016) have damageable cover rather than simulated cover. Explosions remove the wall, floors collapse, and a car you were hiding behind will eventually catch fire and stop being a car. What they do not do is work out whether a rifle shot passes through a given surface: cover is still a stated bonus to the target's defence, and a flank still cancels it.

Phoenix Point (Snapshot Games, 2019) goes further, because you aim at parts of a target by hand and the projectiles damage what they hit along the way, so a burst of fire can clear away the thing the enemy was using. Into the Breach (Subset Games, 2018) makes terrain destruction into the whole puzzle: mountains crack, buildings take hits that cost you the run, and shoving an enemy into a hole is usually better than shooting it.

Fort Triumph (CookieByte Entertainment, 2020) is the comedy version and a genuinely clever one: you kick an enemy into a tree, the tree falls, and it lands on somebody else. Freedom Force (Irrational Games, 2002) and Freedom Force vs the Third Reich (2005) let superheroes throw the street furniture at each other in real time with a pause. They Are Billions (Numantian Games, 2019) has walls that matter mainly because the horde takes them apart.

Why so few games do it properly

Three reasons, and they are all real.

It breaks level design. A hand-built map with a careful route through it stops being that map once the player can delete a wall, and every encounter has to work when the terrain is gone.
It breaks the enemy. An AI that handles cover as a scored position has to recalculate the whole map when the positions stop existing, and most of them simply do not cope.
It makes the numbers hard to show. The appeal of a stated percentage over an enemy's head is that it is a promise. Once walls have thickness and bullets have paths, the honest answer to how likely a shot is to land becomes complicated, and some of that complexity has to reach the player.

What it buys when it works

Every fight stops having a correct answer. If the enemy is in a building and the building can be taken apart, then the tactical problem has several real solutions rather than one intended one, and the player's clever idea is more likely to be a thing the game actually supports.

It also removes the oldest annoyance in the genre, which is being told that a knee-high crate protects a standing person from a rifle because the tile says so.

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.

What we will say is that the list above is short, the best entry on it is from 2003, and nobody has seriously picked the idea up since. That is the kind of gap worth looking at.