Current Events > I tried the Frozen Synapse demo

(+) Yeah! (+)

It's not a new game btw, it's been around for a while, even has a sequel. Heard it was an interesting tactical game. Basically, you preset your actions, and then you and your opponent's actions are resolved at the same time. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to 100% guess where your opponent is in order to shoot them, if you're facing your opponent and are within range, you'll engage in a firefight. I might not be doing the game justice by describing it, there's a lot of preplanning you can do.

There's about five seconds per turn. You have different movement speeds depending on whether you're aiming, ducking, or just normal. You can set multiple waypoints for movement and have a different (or multiple) actions on each waypoint. Though again, since each turn has a limited amount of time, it may not all be able to resolve at once. I believe you can interrupt performing some actions on the next turn, as long as you aren't in the process of doing it.

Though I mentioned that units pretty much autofire, at least one unit (remember I've only tried the demo), rocket launchers, you have to fire manually. So they pretty much are the guessing type unit. But they can destroy barriers and have an AoE, so it isn't as if they're gimped.

The demo has a few campaign maps, which aren't that bad, an like a quick gen thing, which gives you a mid-range, a shotgun, and a rocket launcher unit, VS the same team + another rocket launcher unit. Honestly having a lot of trouble beating that even once. It often feels like I'm forced to take a trade, but then sometimes I don't even get to trade, because there's another unit that moves in a way you didn't expect. By the way, you can actually simulate how you and your opponent will move before you do the turn proper. So you can try and guess, and then adjust your moves accordingly, to see if something will work in a particular position.

There's a lot to it, definitely considering buying it. I heard 2 adds even more to the mechanics. I almost wonder though, should I try a tactics game that might be relatively more simple? I've heard XCOM is hard, but I don't think it plays the exact same way, so it might be easier in a sense.

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Couldn't think of what the quick gen thing was called until I just played again right now. Skirmish mode. I did win one, although it was more of a draw, there were two rocket launcher units left on both sides, you practically can't hit one another, rockets only explode on contact with a wall, and those end up easy to avoid.

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