Depth of Extinction

I have a soft spot for budget tactics games that punch above their weight, and Depth of Extinction is precisely that kind of awkward overachiever. On paper it reads like a genre Frankenstein: the squad combat borrows heavily from XCOM, the overworld is a node map you navigate region by region in a submarine much like FTL, and the whole thing is wrapped in a pixel-art post-apocalyptic setting where the oceans have swallowed civilization. Each of those components is recognizable, none of them is original, but the combination has a scrappy charm that held my attention for well beyond a casual afternoon. The turn-based combat is the part that actually works best. Each soldier gets two action points per turn to spend on moving, shooting, reloading, or going into overwatch, which lets them fire at any enemy who moves through their line of sight. The class roster, which grows to ten options including the Assault, Deadeye (sniper), Wildcat (SMG specialist with burst-fire bonus shots), Wrecker (heavy weapons, grenades with wider blast radius), and Soldier archetypes, gives you enough squad-building latitude to approach rooms differently each run. The Saboteur class added in later updates also introduced stealth approaches and ambush setups, which helps break the monotony on higher difficulties. Weapon-class matching matters too: equip an off-class weapon and you eat a reload penalty, so the loadout screen is a genuine decision point rather than a cosmetic one. The tactical layer also includes a smart follow command where one character leads and the rest shadow them in cover, auto-looting and falling into overwatch when contact is made. It is a small thing that cuts navigation friction significantly. The strategic layer, though, is where the cracks show. The submarine moves between map nodes and burns fuel with each hop, so resource pressure exists, but it never bites as hard as FTL's clock-driven urgency. On standard difficulty, reviewers noted that aggressive room-clearing tactics tend to make the game lose its teeth after the first third, since enemies only activate when a squad member enters their detection radius. Rushing a breach-and-clear strategy can trivialize encounters that would be tense if you slowed down. Crank up to hardcore and permadeath hits hard, but the middle-ground difficulty feels under-tuned. Repetition in mission environments is the other repeated criticism: warehouse tilesets appear constantly, and while the procedural generation shuffles enemy placement, you will recognize the furniture well before the credits roll. For newcomers to the genre, the onboarding is respectably friendly. A step-by-step prologue walks through movement, cover, and range without condescending, and the UI surfaces enough information that you can make informed decisions on your first run. The stat system is deliberately lean, two skill points per level-up with class-specific bonuses, which means you are never paralyzed by a wall of numbers. Veterans wanting Xenonauts-style granularity will find it shallow. First-timers worried about XCOM complexity will find it approachable. That positioning actually makes it a reasonable entry point for the genre before you commit to heavier titles. The Definitive Edition released post-launch addressed much of the initial community feedback with six rounds of significant updates, tightening the game length and adding stealth mechanics and new enemy types. The Steam community is small but the reception sits at roughly 72 percent positive, which fairly reflects a game that over-delivers for its low price tier but under-delivers against its own genre benchmarks. No mod ecosystem to speak of, no multiplayer, and the voice acting is amateur enough that you may want to mute it early. The pixel art and atmospheric soundtrack, on the other hand, are genuinely well done and give the flooded-world setting more personality than the thin story earns on its own.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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