Post Script

Off the grid: how tactics games are breaking free of the XCOM template

When Jake Solomon and his team at Firaxis reinvented Julian Gollop’s original X-COM design for more modern sensibilities, they tried many things. As Solomon shared in E368’s Collected Works, two entire prototypes were scrapped, over the course of multiple years, for being too complicated. But eventually the team settled on a simplified format: two actions per soldier per turn, one of which is generally used to move them on a gridded map. (On PC – the grid was hidden for console players.)

It ended up working so well that, as XCOM: Enemy Unknown nudged the turn-based tactics game back into fashion in the west, this format became the norm. In its wake came a flood of lesser games that essentially redecorated the same systems for whatever setting was chosen – the Cold War, cosmic horror and so on ignoring the fact that XCOM worked in part because its mechanics served the theme: of soldiers on the ground, pushing gradually forward into the jaws of an unknown threat. This was something Into The Breach understood, keeping the grid and two-action format while putting a fresh emphasis on prediction and repositioning of enemies that suited its kaiju-wrestling mech action.

Restrictions on movement really started to loosen up with Mario + Rabbids. The first game introduced leapfrogging jumps that let you launch from a squadmate’s head. Line things up just right, and these could be used to cover almost the entire span of a battlefield in a single turn. That was taken further in this year’s sequel, Sparks Of Hope, which liberated its characters from the strictures of the grid entirely, letting them move around freely within a wide circle around their starting location, bouncing off friends and tackling foes until they commit to firing their weapon, which finally roots them on the spot for the rest of the turn.

Gears Tactics and Hard West 2, meanwhile, have pushed the limits of the number of possible actions per turn. The former tops up your action points every time you down and execute an enemy, your soldier apparently revitalised by the sight of Locust intestines in the teeth of their guns’ chainsaw attachments. The latter offers three action points, but more importantly a Bravado system that refills a character’s actions each time they pull off a kill – the equivalent of that moment in a Western when the gunslinger hammers their revolver and drops six enemies in the blink of an eye.

Solomon and his team are, we’d assume, voracious consumers of tactics games, since Midnight Suns’ combat folds in the minor revolutions of all these titles. The ‘knockback’ keyword is a tribute to Into The Breach’s enemy repositioning, allowing you to pull an enemy in range of their own grenade just as it goes off, or nudge them over a ledge (one of the few examples of probability in the game – it’s a joy to watch them teetering as the game decides whether they’ll fall). This can also be achieved with a tackle move straight out of Rabbids, and while that game and this must have been in development simultaneously, they both reach the same conclusion about the grid. And smart play will see you chaining together numbers of actions to rival the apparent impossibility of Gears and Hard West’s best turns.

In fact, on both of these latter points, Midnight Suns goes further still. The only bounds to your movement are the edges of the battlefield itself. (Admittedly, the maps are considerably smaller than the genre standard, more akin to wrestling rings than obstacle courses.) And it does away with per-character action points entirely, in favour of a shared hand of cards. It’s not the first game to combine this with positional tactics, but it is one of the few to do it very well.

There’s an understanding that cards are inherently situational, and that the randomness of the draw combined with the endless possible placements of bodies in a physical space can easily leave you feeling helpless – something that both Fights In Tight Spaces and this year’s Floppy Knights often seemed to forget. In

Midnight Suns, there are multiple safety nets in place. The two redraws each turn allow you to root around for more useful abilities, as do attacks that offer card draw as a side-effect. And if that fails, you can just ignore the cards entirely and make use of the props that are dropped into this wrestling ring at the start of a match, taking out threats with environmental attacks.

This might make it sound like there’s no challenge to be found here, while in fact it is simply displaced: the challenge lies in how effectively you juggle your various resources. Heroism points, accrued through playing some cards and spent by playing others or using environmental attacks. A single movement, shared between all three of your units. And the cards themselves, of which you’re able to play three (although there are multiple ways of adding to this number) and the contents of your hand. After all, you can’t do much with a spare card play if you’ve got no cards left.

It’s not that Midnight Suns’ combat is easy, then, but rather that it allows for incredible comebacks and turns that seem borderline unfair. As it should. Being on the edge of defeat, then turning things around, is the bread and butter of superhero fight scenes. And when three Avengers are facing down a band of Hydra goons? It shouldn’t feel like a fair fight. Firaxis might be borrowing from all the games it helped to inspire, but really

Midnight Suns works because it does what the weaker imitators couldn’t, taking the essential fantasy of its source material and building the mechanics around it.

When three Avengers are facing down a band of Hydra goons? It shouldn’t feel like a fair fight