Antisquad

Antisquad is a turn-based tactical strategy game built around a rogue paramilitary unit operating out of the southern United States. The concept has real appeal: a squad of burned-out military veterans who ditched the bureaucracy to run their own operation. On paper, that framing sets up exactly the kind of gritty, character-driven tactics experience that fans of X-COM or Jagged Alliance tend to chase. In practice, what InsGames delivered in 2014 is a rougher, narrower product than that comparison implies, and it helps to know that going in. The core loop is unit-based tactical combat on grid-style maps, with each squad member bringing differentiated roles to engagements. You position, you shoot, you manage action points, and you try not to get your people killed. For a small studio release, the bones of the system are functional. Players who enjoy fiddling with squad composition and cover angles will find something to work with, even if the decision tree never gets especially deep. The class distinctions are present but not particularly nuanced, and the build variety is limited enough that you will likely settle on one reliable formation early and not feel pushed to experiment much after that. Where Antisquad struggles most visibly is AI quality and mission variety. Enemy behavior is predictable after a short time with the game, which removes most of the tension that makes tactical combat genuinely satisfying. When you can anticipate exactly how opponents will respond to your positioning, the chess-match feeling evaporates. The mission structure also leans repetitive, which is a real problem for a genre where late-game complexity is usually the payoff for grinding through early content. There is no robust mod ecosystem here to compensate, and the tutorial is thin enough that newcomers may find the opening hours more confusing than challenging. The Steam review score sitting at 52% positive from under 300 reviews tells its own story. This is not a game with a quietly devoted fanbase that the algorithm buried. It is a game with genuine design limitations that its community flagged honestly. If you are a die-hard tactics player who has exhausted everything else in the genre and wants something offbeat and budget-tier to experiment with, Antisquad is not entirely without interest. For anyone else, especially players newer to tactical strategy, the genre has far better entry points that will teach mechanics, reward patience, and scale in complexity appropriately. For the record, Diego's usual recommendation in this genre is to start with something that respects your time through its systems architecture. Antisquad does not quite clear that bar. The premise is scrappy in a way that could have been charming, but the execution does not back it up enough to make a strong case for prioritizing it over the alternatives sitting on most players' wishlists.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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