Shadow Corps Demo

Tactical video games have quite a wide audience, despite what you might think. You only need to look at games like X-COM, Commandos and Jagged Alliance to see how devoted and excited the fans are. However, it would seem like the genre is just not very lively lately, except of course for the brilliant X-COM releases from the last few years.

Shadow Corps is an upcoming turn-based tactics game featuring old-school gameplay mechanics, as well as a few interesting new additions to the formula. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but in the genre at hand it is quite difficult to even use the wheel, let alone add anything new to it. Although this is but an alpha release for promotional purposes, it would seem that the developers did their homework, although it tough to say whether the replayability is up there or not.

Story-wise, not much is known at this point, other than the fact that the action takes place in the future, somewhere in space. More exactly, 2509 is the year in question, and the biggest threat to the galaxy are the warlords and their mercenary armies. Your task is to protect the innocent from these mercenaries and deal with all sorts of criminals.

The game uses team-based mechanics to make the action feel more exciting, which means that you also get to customize your team and choose its members. There are a few classes to choose from as of right now, such as heavy, support, and sniper. Once you are on a mission, positioning is quite important as well, which basically means taking cover before returning fire, or generally avoiding to let your men without protection.

The turn-based mechanics work like a charm, although it still feels like something is missing right now. There are not many interesting things happening, and it would appear that there’s not much to do, other than hide behind boxes and clicking on the enemies to shoot them. On the other hand, many other features and possibilities could be part of the final product, so it would be premature to judge at this point in time.

Shadow Corps is definitely on the right path, but it still needs to kick it up a notch or two. More combat features and options are needed, and it would be nice to customize the team members a bit more. Other than that, it’s always nice to play a good TBT, even if this one is not yet cooked on both sides.

Note: The game is currently trying to get Greenlit on Steam, so it would be nice to vote for it on the official page.