

If it’s XCOM’s freeform campaign and the constant threat of permanently losing your soldiers that you want, BattleTech has you covered there, too. You’re tweaking your loadout down to the individual pound of weight, trying to find a way to get an extra heat sink without making your Centurion too heavy to move. That’s not to mention the heat management - heavy weapons on hot planets are a no-no - and the endless mech customisation between battles. A leg with busted legs will tumble to the ground, for example. Firing a weapon is incredibly granular - you can target one of 11 body segments on enemy mechs, and taking out specific body parts will hamper them in a different way. BattleTech’s turn-based combat has no grid, which is freeing: you can go anywhere, exploit any angle of attack, and position your squad in unconventional ways. Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom BattleĬontrol 60 tonne mechs as they blast rockets and rip each other’s arms off. You’ll start by covering a small corner of the world, which means the rest is out of your control - watching casualty reports roll in makes it all feel urgent, and the pressure from nation members of the Xenonauts project, mixed with a Cold War USA-USSR conflict, keeps ramping up the pressure. Outside of combat you build and manage radar stations and bases to track alien activity. Fresh additions include the ability to reserve time units (action points) between combat turns as well as tactical aerial combat when you scramble your jets. The UI is cleaner, although still complicated and without a tutorial, and you can still rename your squad of soldiers, which we love, but also means it hurts more when they die. Xenonauts is far closer to the original 1994 X-COM: UFO Defense than the modern XCOM games - in fact, it’s essentially a faithful indie remake, steep difficulty curve and all, with a few much-needed quality of life tweaks.
