It’s been in Early Access for a fair while, but Julian Gollop’s latest brainchild has left those woods as of early this morning.
That child’s name: Chaos Reborn.
As you’d expect from someone who created a monster as gargantuan as the X-COM series, Chaos Reborn’s a turn-based game. There’s no humans vs aliens mechanic in this though — it’s all about duelling wizards and their spell decks.
Now that I read that, the whole thing sounds like it has a bit of a Magic: The Gathering BattleMage vibe. The game was successfully crowdfunded early last year, raising just over $291,000 at today’s exchange rates.
The original pitch was a large single-player campaign paired with asynchronous or live multiplayer, monthly online leagues, and support for up to four players.
The fun in it is more or less picking the best move available. Every spell has a risk/reward to it and the whole game plays out a bit like a dynamic version of chess. The launch trailer below paints a clearer picture.
Given that XCOM 2 has been delayed into 2016, Chaos Reborn — which has no relation to Dota 2, but I keep thinking about it because “Reborn” — might be the trick if you’re looking for some turn-based action this year.
Actually, come to think of it, there hasn’t been an awful lot of turn-based strategy in 2015. Beyond Earth’s Rising Tide expansion came out last month, but a lot of air went out of that balloon real fast. Klei’s Invisible, Inc. was pretty good mind you — and that’s coming out on PS4, although I don’t think a release date’s been announced yet.
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3 responses to “The Maker Of X-COM Has A New Turn Based Game About Wizards”
Showing my age, but loved this on the Speccy many moons ago. That and Laser Squad were brilliant!
Yep. This was one of the first games I ever played. Chaos and dizzy.
There’s been a steady stream of them, they just haven’t really been high profile titles so they’re easy to miss. Codename S.T.E.A.M was probably the biggest name along with Massive Chalice. In some circles Disgaea 5 was a really big one, though your mileage may vary about whether it counts as “strategy” or not. I’ve been keen to try Chaos Reborn out but only if the singleplayer is good.