Steam Squad Reviews

This is a updated review as of 11-5-14 The UI "was" awful, Its much better now with new update. It still has poor sound that is very muffled. It now has better conveyance of who is firing or being fired on. The camera got a major overhaul. The pan smothing is much better now. When someone does get killed they just slump. This game does have potential and is getting better. This is a updated review as of 11-5-14

As a great fan of turn based strategies and everything related to Great war, I have been following developing of this game since its campaign at Kickstarter for a year or so, waiting for it to become usable and interesting. Finally after recent updates - being able to equip its own squad and use heavy machinery, decided to go for into playing in it. If to summarize its pros and contras, here they are: Difficult to accomplish missions if you do not play accurately and smart. Soldiers are killed with 1-2 shots or grenade and you have just few of them - like it when it is hard :-) Good looking and high quality graphics, music, game mechanics etc; Updates are coming every week and as it have been told by developers it is scheduled to be ready in full this summer already. Feels like it is progressing fast to be finalized; Cons: Still too few missions :-( and only one is so far with tanks and artillery; Quite many of the iconic symbols of Great War are missing - barbed wire, gas, cavalry attacks...or at least I did not see it yet - did not find info from developers if they plan to have it

Steam Squad is a nice game and i would give it a positive review but, its so unpolished that i just cant do it. There is no camera rotation, quick save feature nor mission/campaign selection, these last two hurt a lot when there are achievements that depend on how you do a campaign, because there is no way to start second campaing withouth going through the first one all over again and the tutorial, which cant be skipped. Sadly these updates wont happen as the game is rather old and probably no longer supported by the dev team.

What looked great in early mode just didnt hit the mark. If you are going to bother with a good turn based squad game do it right. This is a waste of money, I tried to like it and I gave it a go with a few restarts but honestly I cant see me going back to his again. no relation to your characters even though they can carry on to other missions. No real stealth so you can see what will happen. Just some game makers having a laugh. Gross disappoint for something which looked like it was going to be good. Waste of money unless it is for £2.

The game is ok but there needs to be a way to rotate the map. Additionally there needs to be a "retreat" mode or "end mission" option. Having to fight to the last man every time is unnecesarily time consuming. I would also like the option of killing the cut scenes where i have to watch members of my squad make thier first move. Boring and useless. On the up side, I did get it on sale.....

For a turn-based squad game there is enough for me to recommend it. * It incorporates action points well * The maps are interesting * Units are role based rather then stat based * It has freaking opportunity fire! * The alt history makes the engagements interesting and fun That said, the UI is a bit rough and lacks pollish. Graphically, it's a bit jarring, but completely serviceable. If you can get past those warts, the game has many gameplay delights to offer.

The game looked like a gem, but failed in too many aspects. I played only to the 3d mission, may be it would go better, and there'll be bugfixes, but in current state I definitely can't recommend it to anyone. Cons (that's why it is negative after all): 1. The game is very unpolished. Things are little but they are everywhere. 2. AI. It is not stupid, strange mix of bad RNG (it is even worse then in X-Com), good tactics and dumb pathfinding. 3. Bugs. Annoying. Enemy perfectly fine goes through 4 man on overwatch (AP left) and kills one of them in melee. Other time my soldier shoot on overwatch out of cone of fire... 4. graphics are ok in some places and just bad and unpolished in others, screenshots are carefully picked. X-com like action camera is the worst part, it is funny here, not dramatic. 5. Combat system is shallow, expected much more from the description. Pros: 1. Nice setting 2. Really good atmosphere (when not hindered by funny jumping soldiers), all these films and letters home are very nice. 3. UI is nice, but not as informative as I would like it to be. But very nice. 4. Music is good too. May be devs shod consider making a movie or a comics. Most good things about this game is, sadly, not about gameplay,

Feels like an early access game. The game has a lot of potential if they fix some things. I wanted to like this game, but I just found myself getting frustrated with it. If they do fix some of the issues I could see myself recommending this game, but I can't in it's current state. - Minimap could use some work, you can't see the area that your camera is view on it. - Cover is very frustrating for me. It's hard to know if you are in cover or not and what area you will be able to see from positions if you decide to move to that spot. I had one situation where I thought my guy was in cover behind a building. I could see that he was on overwatch in the direction I wanted with all of his action points available. Then on the enemy's turn some invisible guy was able to spot mine and kill him while my guy never saw him. - It would be nice if I had some indication if my solder can fire on an enemy. - Not colorblind friendly, it does ok, but there are no options to adjust the color at all.

Was really hoping this was going to be a gem, but it seems to have totally missed the mark for me. Ultimately, this is an extremely shallow game, granted I only made it to the third mission before having to quit forever, so maybe there's more content I haven't seen... but doubtful. For starters, the first thing I noticed about this was the extremely amateur production. And that's not in like a indy-dev boot-straps and moxy kind of way, it's a very unpolished game that shows very little thought was put into many of the design choices, even things that have been standard for years. Interface is pretty lacking, common QoL shortcuts are none-existant, prepare for lots of needless clicks. Mission briefs are full of useless nonsense and lacking in actual content, you'll read a few .jpg's sliding on the screen and wait for the animation of pages shuffling to see each useless one. Random transitions during the intro cinematic were absolutely jarring really the first big red flag I noticed. They quickly, often, and randomly changed from cartoony animated 3D, to 2D, to actual live footage, to still shots, and then back again. Pick a style! It's like all the content was salvaged from the free demo bin Baby's First Game Dev book. It honestly feels like a lot of things in here were added to increase the game's run time and pad the clock. Either to create and illusion of lots of content, or to get people past the Steam refund wall. But, that's all kind of nit-picky stuff I realize most won't care about. So actual gameplay. It's shallow, real shallow. In the first three missions I played through I was presented with the same 3 unit types. Their differences end up being trivial ultimately to the mission at hand. There is an inventory but it is clunky and I regret even noticing it because it was irrelevant to the game and just forced me to navigate more terrible menus. The actual missions are dull just wait for them to rush into our overwatch areas, forced cinematics that are hardly what I would call 'animated' that add nothing but time to the mission. At the end your well performing troops get experience and stats... but what that is good for I've yet to determine. 3 missions, you'd think you'd get a level up, or new gear, or new unit, or something. But no, there is absolutely nothing new to incentivize good performance or even loading the next map... so I didn't. So at the end of that, I think this game is really close to being something great but seems to have been pretty mismanaged for a while and is way off target for what would be expected of a modern game. P2W mobile games have more content than this for before the paywall.

Steam Squad. What it is: Squad based turn strategy game, with a Steam Punk, cartoonish WWI setting. PROS: [list] [*] Solid game mechanics. [*] Easy to learn yet tactic gameplay. [*] Beautiful graphics. [*] Nice, interesting story and setting. [*] Great steam mechas (planes and tanks), that will be usable in the final release (according to developers) [*] Mele weapons! Bring out the pitchforks!! [*] The developer is VERY involved in the forums, and many of the bugs/fixes/changes adressed there have been taken care of. [*] The developer promised to work on a modding extension after the release. [*] Battlecam!! It has been implemented and works great, with a depth of field effect and nice color correction, that gives an old film feeling. Great! [/list] CONS: [list] [*] Gameplay feels a little light, specially if you compare it to old school tbs games like Silent Storm, JA2 or Fallout tactics. Hopefully the tank play will compensate that. [*] In order to make the gameplay more fluid, prone/kneel/stand positions have been changed to a more fluid "kneel while standing still, stand while running/shooting for cover - no prone" mechanics. More fluid, but also lighter. [/list] What I LIKE: [list] [*] Setting. [*] Graphics and game concept. [*] Game mechanics. [*] Full ballistics engine. [*] Destroyable enviroment (promised by developers, not yet implemented). [*] Interactive fauna. [*] Graphical display of Action Points, both in the small valve like dial, and in the movement line, where it shows you in easy to read green-amber-red tones how far your character can move before running out of AP. [*] Part of the game is developed in [b] Blender,[/b] which is Free and Open Source Software, and it's released for linux. [/list]