You lead a small squad of survivors across a ruined desert, deciding who to help and who to turn away as you roll into wrecked towns. Fights are turn-based on a grid, and how well you do depends on the specific skills you picked for each character. It has a stern, old-fashioned edge to it, so go in expecting a tough, text-heavy survival story rather than a modern polished RPG.
Gameplay video
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Screenshots & review notes
Overall
It's rougher around the edges than its more famous descendants, but there's a bleak, uncompromising honesty to its post-apocalyptic squad management that still resonates.
Moment to moment
Skill checks and moral dilemmas carry real weight, and the tactical combat demands actual planning rather than button-mashing. Some systems feel dated by today's standards.
Art and atmosphere
The wasteland setting is suitably grim and sun-bleached, though the presentation overall feels a generation behind its contemporaries. Functional rather than flashy.
Worth your time?
A must for CRPG diehards tracing the lineage of the genre, less essential for players wanting modern polish. Patience is required.
Frames captured from the gameplay video above; notes are our own take on the game.
What it's like to play
You command a squad of Desert Rangers walking the ruined American southwest from a top-down view, moving from location to location and engaging in turn-based fights where each character spends action points on moving and shooting. Outside of combat, skill checks constantly come up in conversation and exploration, so a character skilled in things like lockpicking or animal handling can open up entirely different solutions to a problem than a character built for straight combat. Building a squad with a spread of these skills at the very start is one of the most important decisions you make in the whole game.
Your goal is to explore two large regions, complete quests for various factions, and deal with the consequences of your choices, which the game takes seriously; ignoring a radio call for help, for example, can mean that settlement suffers or falls entirely while you were off doing something else. The Director's Cut version adds a more precise aiming system for combat and reworked perks that give your characters more distinct specialties. A full playthrough covering both regions runs somewhere around forty hours.
The interface and menus are dense and clearly built with a keyboard and mouse in mind first, so navigating them with a controller takes some patience. The opening hours are genuinely unforgiving while you are still learning which skills actually matter, and the visuals are plain and functional rather than impressive. It is a good match for players who want their choices to have real, sometimes harsh, consequences in a turn-based tactical game.