You control a small squad of mechs defending city blocks from underground insects, and before you act each turn, the game shows you exactly what every enemy plans to do next. Your job is to use that information to block attacks, push enemies into each other, or sacrifice a building to save more people elsewhere. Matches are short but dense, closer to a puzzle than a typical strategy game, since a single wrong move can end a run.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
The verdict
Subset Games followed up FTL with something even tighter, a turn-based puzzle box with barely a wasted mechanic. It's short, dense, and endlessly clever.
The mechanics
Showing you exactly where enemies will strike turns tactics into pure puzzle-solving, forcing you to think several moves ahead rather than reacting in the moment. Deceptively difficult.
Presentation
The minimalist pixel art and moody synth score suit its compact, cerebral design perfectly. It's one of the lightest games on the system in terms of performance demands.
Staying power
Short battles make it perfect for handheld sessions, and the variety of mech squads adds real replay value. A must for strategy fans, even those usually intimidated by the genre.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You control a small squad of giant robots on a compact grid, usually eight tiles by eight, defending a city from insects that crawl up out of the ground. Before you act, the game shows you exactly which tile every enemy is about to attack and what it will do, so your job each turn is to move your mechs and use their attacks to prevent that damage, often by shoving an enemy into another enemy or off the grid entirely. You are not always trying to kill things; frequently the smarter move is just pushing a bug out of the way so it cannot hit a building.
The goal on each map is to keep enough buildings standing to reach a evacuation point, and a single mission usually takes well under twenty minutes to finish. As you complete islands the threats change and multiply, forcing you to juggle more enemies at once with the same small set of mechs, and losing too many buildings ends the run early. You unlock different mech squads over time, each with a completely different toolkit, like ones that freeze enemies in place or ones that only push and never directly attack.
Because you can always see what is coming, losses feel like a puzzle you misread rather than bad luck, which is satisfying but can also feel like a real gut punch when you realize the perfect move too late. Sessions are short enough to fit into a spare ten minutes, which makes it an easy game to dip into on a handheld. It suits people who like chess-like puzzles more than fast reflexes, and it can feel slow or dry to anyone hoping for quick action.