XCOM. Civilization. Invisible Inc. Endless Legend. Don’t look now, but if you’re a fan of video games where the action is broken up into turns, you’ve never had it better.
Despite being one of the oldest game design fundamentals around, having been so liberally lifted from tabletop gaming all those decades ago, over the past few years developers seem to have found a number of ways to retain the strengths of turn-based gaming — whether it be in a strategy title, RPG or something else — while improving pretty much everything else about it.
Invisible Inc. turns a system normally used for combat into one designed to avoid it. XCOM’s camera makes the slowest combat system on earth feel like an action movie. And those are just two. There’s Massive Chalice, and the Trails of Cold Steel series, and Order of Battle, and maybe even Superhot if you want to get creative, all doing their own thing and doing it in weird and wonderful ways. It feels like every few months a new game is coming out that redefines what a turn-based game is and what we can expect it to do.
The latest game like this to get me excited is a new standalone expansion for PC strategy title Panzer Corps, called Soviet Corps. While the core game (and its 117,000 expansions) have a ton of campaigns letting you fight as the Germans and Western Allies, this is the first time you’ve been able to play a full campaign as the Soviets, and while most of the campaign goes as expected (you retreat initially before steam-rolling the Germans with waves of tanks), there are some very pleasant surprises tucked away in some of the missions.
Anyone who’s played old Westwood or Blizzard RTS games will remember the hero/indoor missions (like this), where the standard base-building level design gave way to something more intimate as you guided a small team of infantry through a confined space.
Soviet Corps brings the diversionary spirit of these missions back, only within the confines of a turn-based strategy game. In previous Corps campaigns (and most games like this), your objectives are normally fairly conservative. Capture XX objectives or destroy XX units.
Soviet Corps also lets players take on the Japanese in the East
And while there are plenty of missions here that still ask you just that, you’re also occasionally given allies and goals like helping partisans behind enemy lines blowing up bridges, convincing the Romanian army to swap sides, capturing German officers from an airfield and, most insane, there’s an urban warfare mission with a sewer network that will shuffle your infantry across the map.
Given the inherent issues of pacing and repetition present in turn-based combat, these kind of tricks really help break up the monotony of pushing tanks across a hexagonal battlefield for hours on end. They’re also a great challenge, forcing the player to rapidly change their existing strategies and move on the fly to protect or meet their objectives.
It’s exactly the kind of thing I love seeing in my turn-based games these days: a solid implementation of traditional combat with an injection of something new and/or weird that changes things just enough to make the whole thing feel nice and fresh.
Comments
13 responses to “We’re Living In A Turn-Based Golden Age”
Endless space is probably one of my favourites atm, I love watching the fleet battles that are kinda like a movie. But I kinda wish the final fantasy games would go back to their old turn-based combat.
Totally agree. I’ve tried playing multiple final fantasies, but just can’t get the hang of it – the original FF, however, played right through to the end. Love that kind of stuff!
Turn-based *strategy* golden age maybe.
Most of the turn-based RPGs have disappeared or devolved into quasi action games.
Bravely Second, Digimon Cyber Sleuth, Persona 5 & Shin Megami Tensei IV Final as well as 3DS versions of both Dragon Quest VII & VIII.
I dunno, I think we’ve got it pretty good this year too 😉
(Not that I believe for a second we’ll see Final in English for a very long time, if at all)
Oh! & Pokemon Son & Mün!
That’s because Nintendo just keep making the same game they made in 1996 and you chumps all buy it, though.
Yeah, buts it’s fun every time 🙂
Not sure that DQ counts since those games are PS1/PS2 era, and Bravely is deliberately a throwback.
I was more referring to the fact that all the really high-profile stuff has become basically an action game. Final Fantasy, for example. Dragon Age is another.
Disagree with that – Divinity Original Sin is one of the best turn-based RPGs I have seen for a long time.
That & Wasteland 2
Can’t wait for that BattleTech
Advance Wars and fire emblem 7 and sacred stone are still my favorite turn based gaems
Darkest Dungeon is a masochist simulator i swear to god i cant handle that shit dude.
I think the fact that most bug titles these days have amalgamated into the open world action adventure style genre has given the turn based RPG a chance to breath and offer something different to players who are looking to broaden their horizons a bit. By all accounts, Fire Emblem Fates is outselling even Awakening, opening up the genre to even more people than before – which is just fantastic 🙂