XCOM: Enemy Unknown: 2012 turn-based tactical strategy (isometric 3D) game; on Steam for Linux. You kill aliens. Very heavy on the atmosphere and moody graphics, with many special effects and little cut-scenes. As a tactical strategy, it has weaknesses; units must be trained & upgraded over many missions so they are worth their weight in gold, one-shot kills are always possible, getting in the first shot is critical, and the level layout has the standard mechanism where clusters of aliens are triggered when one moves, all of which combine to force on you an extremely conservative gameplay style where you move as slowly as possible through the level with all your soldiers always in cover, lest you trigger 3 or 4 groups of aliens simultaneously and lose one or more near-irreplaceable units. As such, the snipers level up with the greatest of ease as they do most of the killing, and they only get more overpowered when Archangel armor is developed and they can now shoot across almost entire levels without having to move! The levels themselves are not very imaginative either, with all of them boiling down to search-and-destroy in levels which are copies of each other, even the hostage-rescue and bomb-defusing missions (where the best strategy seems to be to, yes, just killing the aliens as fast as possible). Tech upgrades are doled out sparingly, so that one only gets the funnest weapons like the Ghost armor (temporary invisibility) or Blaster Launcher (rockets that go around corners) as the game is ending. I have to contrast the tactical strategy aspect of XCOM unfavorably to the last game I was playing, Advance Wars: Dual Strike: units can be risked in gambits and attacks because losing them is not so devastating, the first-attacker still has a huge advantage but this makes for interesting ambushes and tactics rather than forcing passivity, and since the enemy is always in motion, you are constantly under pressure to act too. Overall, I enjoyed it, but don’t feel any need to play it again.
When it comes to turn-based tactical strategy, Massive Chalice is my favorite recent game specifically because the units age and die.
In XCOM, you choose one squad and ideally no one ever gets hurt, so you use them in every battle. But this means that you don’t get to see most of the options available to players; a team with two snipers and two assaults plays very differently from a balanced squad, for example, and if you go down one upgrade tree you don’t see the others.
In Massive Chalice, your team might be different every single battle (since a unit will typically see ~5 battles), and the classes available to you are determined by the marriages you make (three base classes with six hybrid classes from the combinations). If there isn’t a good hunter match for your hunter regent, then you might find yourself forced to try out the Trickshot. And since units will die eventually anyway, you find yourself actually willing to sacrifice units, instead of trying to go for the perfectionist route.
That sounds interesting, and I’m glad to see it supports Linux, but reading through the Metacritic reviews, I’m a little troubled that they tend to describe the tactical combat as being simpler than XCOM… which I already found pretty simplistic & unchallenging. Have you played both?
Yes—both original XCOM and new XCOM. Overall, I thought that Massive Chalice was very similar to new XCOM tactically, with a bit more focus on melee and less on ranged combat. It also has a bit worse graphics / aesthetics but a superior narrative. There was more variation and ‘freshness’ to the MC battles than to XCOM battles, but it’s rarely challenging in the same way that puzzle games can be challenging. The strategic map on Massive Chalice has more interesting choices, I think, and competes with tactical play in a more interesting way. I’ll try to elaborate on the salient bits of tactics.
All three games have the central narrative of “do things by the book or people die.” This is perhaps the most valuable life lesson one can get from these sorts of games, but it ‘forces passivity’ in a way that more forgiving tactics games don’t. (As mentioned earlier, in Massive Chalice people die even when you do things by the book, which allows for somewhat different choices and narratives.)
Both new XCOM and Massive Chalice have the “two actions per turn” system, with attacks ending the turn in the absence of a special ability. I believe Massive Chalice has more and more interesting ‘keep acting’ abilities, that allow you to do things like step out of cover, launch a shot, and then dash back into cover.
Massive Chalice has the same length of upgrade tree, with roughly the same number of choices, but more total upgrade trees because of having more classes.
Monsters in Massive Chalice seem more brutal (wait… that shot just ate XP? D:) but sometimes seem “easier to trick”—for example, one region is crossed by rivers, and it’s possible to murder any melee units trapped on the other side of the river from you. In XCOM only a handful of enemy units are melee, so that rarely comes up. Because there is overall less ranged combat and much less in the way of destructible terrain, the character of skirmishes are somewhat different; firefights are infrequent.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown: 2012 turn-based tactical strategy (isometric 3D) game; on Steam for Linux. You kill aliens. Very heavy on the atmosphere and moody graphics, with many special effects and little cut-scenes. As a tactical strategy, it has weaknesses; units must be trained & upgraded over many missions so they are worth their weight in gold, one-shot kills are always possible, getting in the first shot is critical, and the level layout has the standard mechanism where clusters of aliens are triggered when one moves, all of which combine to force on you an extremely conservative gameplay style where you move as slowly as possible through the level with all your soldiers always in cover, lest you trigger 3 or 4 groups of aliens simultaneously and lose one or more near-irreplaceable units. As such, the snipers level up with the greatest of ease as they do most of the killing, and they only get more overpowered when Archangel armor is developed and they can now shoot across almost entire levels without having to move! The levels themselves are not very imaginative either, with all of them boiling down to search-and-destroy in levels which are copies of each other, even the hostage-rescue and bomb-defusing missions (where the best strategy seems to be to, yes, just killing the aliens as fast as possible). Tech upgrades are doled out sparingly, so that one only gets the funnest weapons like the Ghost armor (temporary invisibility) or Blaster Launcher (rockets that go around corners) as the game is ending. I have to contrast the tactical strategy aspect of XCOM unfavorably to the last game I was playing, Advance Wars: Dual Strike: units can be risked in gambits and attacks because losing them is not so devastating, the first-attacker still has a huge advantage but this makes for interesting ambushes and tactics rather than forcing passivity, and since the enemy is always in motion, you are constantly under pressure to act too. Overall, I enjoyed it, but don’t feel any need to play it again.
When it comes to turn-based tactical strategy, Massive Chalice is my favorite recent game specifically because the units age and die.
In XCOM, you choose one squad and ideally no one ever gets hurt, so you use them in every battle. But this means that you don’t get to see most of the options available to players; a team with two snipers and two assaults plays very differently from a balanced squad, for example, and if you go down one upgrade tree you don’t see the others.
In Massive Chalice, your team might be different every single battle (since a unit will typically see ~5 battles), and the classes available to you are determined by the marriages you make (three base classes with six hybrid classes from the combinations). If there isn’t a good hunter match for your hunter regent, then you might find yourself forced to try out the Trickshot. And since units will die eventually anyway, you find yourself actually willing to sacrifice units, instead of trying to go for the perfectionist route.
That sounds interesting, and I’m glad to see it supports Linux, but reading through the Metacritic reviews, I’m a little troubled that they tend to describe the tactical combat as being simpler than XCOM… which I already found pretty simplistic & unchallenging. Have you played both?
Yes—both original XCOM and new XCOM. Overall, I thought that Massive Chalice was very similar to new XCOM tactically, with a bit more focus on melee and less on ranged combat. It also has a bit worse graphics / aesthetics but a superior narrative. There was more variation and ‘freshness’ to the MC battles than to XCOM battles, but it’s rarely challenging in the same way that puzzle games can be challenging. The strategic map on Massive Chalice has more interesting choices, I think, and competes with tactical play in a more interesting way. I’ll try to elaborate on the salient bits of tactics.
All three games have the central narrative of “do things by the book or people die.” This is perhaps the most valuable life lesson one can get from these sorts of games, but it ‘forces passivity’ in a way that more forgiving tactics games don’t. (As mentioned earlier, in Massive Chalice people die even when you do things by the book, which allows for somewhat different choices and narratives.)
Both new XCOM and Massive Chalice have the “two actions per turn” system, with attacks ending the turn in the absence of a special ability. I believe Massive Chalice has more and more interesting ‘keep acting’ abilities, that allow you to do things like step out of cover, launch a shot, and then dash back into cover.
Massive Chalice has the same length of upgrade tree, with roughly the same number of choices, but more total upgrade trees because of having more classes.
Monsters in Massive Chalice seem more brutal (wait… that shot just ate XP? D:) but sometimes seem “easier to trick”—for example, one region is crossed by rivers, and it’s possible to murder any melee units trapped on the other side of the river from you. In XCOM only a handful of enemy units are melee, so that rarely comes up. Because there is overall less ranged combat and much less in the way of destructible terrain, the character of skirmishes are somewhat different; firefights are infrequent.