Steam Squad Download PC Game

Steam Squad is a game that makes you miss the bygone era of discs and demos. Tell us what you know about wargames and the strategy genre in general, and you can briefly describe this game.

It's the dawn of the alternate 20th century, a diplomat from the Chinese Tianxia Empire was foolish enough to be shot in the Nizhny Novgorod Empire, causing a version of the familiar World War I story. Steam Squad is very reminiscent of the old Dosbox 90 or X-Com, where your three best soldiers could be killed by one sectarian in the corner of the room because you apparently forgot to pump up your peripheral vision.

Fans of the Microprose classic will be very familiar with Steam Squad's gameplay, though it's implemented much more easily here. You control a squad of up to 8, and each of them starts their turn with a set number of action points (AP), which is determined by their class (gunner, machine gunner, or mortar man), and both moving and shooting take away AP. So sprinting from point to point isn't too smart if you want your men to be able to shoot afterward.

When you find the enemy, you will see three numbers in the bottom right corner underneath the weapon icon of your soldier. They show how many points your soldier will put into shooting at his target. The higher the number, the more accurate he will be. Finally, just like in the old X-Com, if you end a turn with a soldier who still has enough points to shoot and one of the enemies wanders into his field of vision during the turn, he will shoot him.

This shows how combat works in the game, and for the most part, your fighters do their job well. Positioning is key to keeping your people alive, and you try to convince the enemy to act on their terms, not the other way around. Riflemen have the most AP of all classes and can kill the enemy with a single shot. The game is very cute, especially for the indie genre, but the animation of the individual soldiers is already pretty primitive, although it is nostalgic.

Each "campaign" consists of five missions, each of which ends up with thirty missions. The missions are relatively short, with most of them running in less than ten minutes. This brevity is something I actually really enjoyed, as I feel the relative simplicity of combat will be much more evident in longer missions. The Switching Perspective also means that the soldiers' deaths aren't as important, since every five missions you'll choose them from a completely different pool than the previous one. Honestly, I didn't notice much difference between how any of the factions played. They all have the same classes, and all their mechanisms work basically the same.