Dead Hand - combat focused tactical roguelike

[OneManArmyGames]

http://www.onemanarmygames.com/dead-hand/

Spoiler

Hey all, indie dev shamelessly plugging his game here.

Dead Hand just came out on Steam, a 3D tactical roguelike where your modular vehicle fights other modular vehicles in a fully destructible procedural cave system.

The combat is old-school Action Point based (think Jagged Alliance, not nuXCOM) but with freeform movement, instead of tile based; and the terrain, which has to be used for cover, can be completely blasted to pieces with rockets and mining drills. There's no XP, all player progression is based on getting more powerful parts and gear.

Here's a playthrough of the first three levels so you can see how it plays:

 

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Good game. I like the brutal turn-based combat and 'one vs all' scenarios that force me to stay on my toes at all times.

I'd like to see another game but with handcrafted levels this time -- decimating a city while trying to stay alive would be enjoyable as hell.

 

[OneManArmyGames]

Glad to hear you like it!

The problem I see with handcrafted levels is that I'd have to tone down the difficulty significantly and/or allow for mid-level saving, since otherwise the Get-a-little-further/Die/Repeat loop would get repetitive quick. Although I guess you could go for a hybrid approach, randomizing the enemies but not the terrain, or having a library of "tiles", each comprising a whole hand-made city block that you could combine randomly...

Blasting away the load bearing pillars of a building so it falls on top of an enemy mech does sound pretty cool; you'd need a very solid physics engine, though.

 

[lightbane]

Yay, yet another indie game that is now worth giving it a try. Stop making so many games look cool, dammit! I still have to finish Beautiful Desolation and Hollow Knight.