Troubleshooter - XCOM/Final Fantasy mashup

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Sly Boots
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Troubleshooter - XCOM/Final Fantasy mashup

Post by Sly Boots » Sun Jul 18, 2021 5:54 pm

I'd never heard about this game prior to the Steam sale, when I fell down a rabbit hole of forum game recommendations before someone suggested this. I checked it out, and that's the story of how my weekend disappeared :lol:

If you like XCOM and also like Final Fantasy/anime, I have no hesitation at all in recommending this, as it's what would happen if the pair of them got together and had a baby, and made Freedom Force the godparent.

It wears its XCOM influence on its sleeve - you play the founder of a squad of legalised vigilantes, basically, who help the police force of a crime-riddled future city keep the peace. Missions play out in fairly generously sized maps where you move your squad around on tiles, issue orders and complete different objectives (stuff like kill all bad guys, rescue civilians, hack datapoints, retrieve lost cargo etc).

If you've played any XCOM game you get the gist, however unlike XCOM, and this is where the FF influence comes in, as well as weapons most of your squad also have quasi-magical abilities to call upon, some of which are ludicrously fun and powerful - in particular the 'ultimate' abilities that you charge up via regular attacks.

FF comes to the fore again with the vast variety of equipment and statistics available and a system of 'masteries' to enhance each character with, which will be somewhat familiar to anyone who's played around with the materia system in FF7. The upshot of this is that there's a simply silly amount of customisation in play, much of which left me initially baffled and bemused, though gradually I became familiar with -most- of the mechanics (and I think translation issues don't always help get the point across terribly well).

Final note to say that the devs appear to be very nice, and regularly update the game (it's had at least a couple of updates each week that I've owned it).

If you've ever wanted an anime tactical strategy game in your life, make it this one :lol:


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