Special Tactics Review

Top-down, tactical, military games about anonymous Special Forces are very much ubiquitous at this point. Frozen Synapse kick-started the show, directly inspiring games like Door Kickers or Breach & Clear, but with clear influences as well in XCOM and Invisible Inc. It’s a treeline that is hard to miss, and Special Tactics seems to be the youngest addition to the family.

Like many of these games, Special Tactics is a game with simultaneously-executed turns. For every turn, in the planning phase, you will be able to plan your soldiers actions within the following few seconds. Much like in many of these kinds of games, each of your troops has a cone of vision that changes in distance and width depending on the type of character they are, just like their movement speed and distance, health and weapon damage. In this line, you want to huddle your shotgun-wielding soldier around corners to pop enemies’ heads as they come; snipers covering long corridors; and the ones with ballistic shields on the front lines, taking as much damage as possible. The other two classes, wielding an assault rifle and an SMG respectively, are your more balanced and polyvalent options, each with a specific range and role nevertheless.

This system is not bad per se. Door Kickers has a similar ‘planning’ and ‘execution’ division, with the distinction that you could pause and resume the game at will. Special Tactics does not work very well, not because the mechanics of the game are bad — they’re for the most part very standardised top-down tactics game — but because your soldiers won’t carry out all orders under that turn, even if in the preparation phase those orders appeared as doable. What’s more, maps are incredibly large and open, with many corners and exits to look out for. In a game where enemies spawn from everywhere with no pre-emptive warning, having so many corners and alleys to look around may make it a bit excruciating.

Another big drawback of this game is the lack of gadgets. You see, this game’s mechanics, while being engaging, are not as finely tuned as in Frozen Synapse. Games like Door Kickers have spiced up the genre by enclosing the player in extremely tight spaces, and making them take advantage of breaching charges and spy cameras, Special Tactics is all about managing distance, lines and the position of your soldiers. This can often be a bit insufferable, as the need to keep moving to reach the target — be it a hostage or a bomb — make it quite hard to keep all corners covered and maximised in terms of soldiers. The aleatory spawns, however, are what make it often feel unfair, and the lack of tactical orders like waiting for other soldiers to get in position is not available and make the game feel quite barebones.

The campaign is the least frustrating game mode — yes, the objectives are repetitive, but the level of difficulty is accessible enough to salvage it and allow you to concatenate a couple of kills in the same turn and make you feel like a badass. However, for somebody with my low level of skill, the multiplayer is out of bounds. I often got paired up with players with over 1000 matches won, having lost every single one I played myself. Survival feels a bit pointless, as it consists of aimlessly defusing bombs and rescuing hostage, only to acquire gold. This gold can later be spent to buy crates and thus get new weapons and grenades, but the road to a crate is so slow and dire that it’s not really worth it. Of course, you can always endeavour into multiplayer to get gold, and clench your sphincters at the harrowing sight of an opponent in the world’s top 10 players.

Grenades are restricted to smoke, flashbangs and frag grenades, with some other options unlockable with gold, but it is a very slender array of options to get tactical. Again, it’s all reduced to line of sights, peeking corners and creating choke points, but even this sometimes feels unfair, with situations where it’s hardly possible to get out of alive. Some may say that the weapons you get from the crates offer a level of tactical depth, but the rough path to get them and the bare changes a different shotgun entails make it an aspect that can easily be ignored.

While this game stands its ground mechanically, it doesn’t do anything particularly better than games like Frozen Synapse or Breach & Clear. As I have mentioned, at times it becomes too frustrating, and the multiplayer-focused level-up system is just tedious. Moreover, it still needs some fine polishing — in multiplayer and survival, for example, you have to choose classes without the chance to have a good look at the map you’re playing in. If you’re fanatically into this particular genre, you’ll probably find Special Tactics challenging in a different way, but not necessarily one of the better games. If you've never played a top-down tactical game, I don’t think this is the one you should dive in with.