Dreadlands

I came to Dreadlands from the shooter side of the fence, skeptical that a turn-based gang skirmisher published by Fatshark was going to hold my attention past the tutorial. Three factions, a shared-world map, co-op and PvP on paper - it sounds like a pitch deck. What surprised me is that the combat loop has real teeth once you understand it, and the three gangs play nothing alike. The Scrappers are your junk-tech ranged outfit, laying bear traps and jamming enemy weapons with tactics cards. The Tribe-Kin bring nature-worshipping beast controllers - yes, you can field a death bear named whatever you want. The Skarbacks are the cybernetic melee bulldozers added at full launch, capable of mixing ranged and close-quarters with equal nastiness. Pick the wrong one for your playstyle and the campaign will grind you down fast. The combat itself borrows XCOM's bones - two action points per turn, full-cover versus half-cover, overwatch - but then layers on a melee-lock system that genuinely changes how gunfights play out. Get rushed and you lose your shooting options entirely until someone disengages or gets knocked back. Guns can jam if you double-fire in the same turn without a repair kit, which sounds punishing but creates real decisions around your tactics card deck. You build a deck of up to eight cards and draw four per mission, and cards range from instant revives to weapon jams dropped on enemies to bonus action grants. The morale system runs parallel to hitpoints: break an enemy gang's morale threshold through kills and executions and they may rout rather than fight to the last man, which opens up a second win condition that a lot of players ignore. That is the part of this game worth engaging with seriously. The world map feels big in a way that does not always work in the game's favor. There is a lot of empty space between encounters, and the mission variety is thin enough that you will notice the repetition before you finish a single faction campaign. Solo players will hit difficulty walls that co-op smooths right out - the AI is aggressive about melee-locking your shooters, and without a partner to peel enemies off, some encounters become miserable. The AI also draws criticism for being predictable in later fights once you understand its rush patterns, though on harder content it can still catch you off-guard. A handful of reviewers noted AI turn hangs requiring reloads, which is the kind of technical roughness that chips away at good will over a long session. The shared-world online component was the ambitious hook - players roaming the same map, bumping into each other for impromptu PvP or flagged co-op - but the playerbase never grew large enough to make that feel alive. PvP exists and works, but you are not going to find a ranked ladder with healthy queue times here. If you come for the competitive angle you will be disappointed. Come for the solo or two-player co-op campaign experience, play through two or three faction stories, and the game earns its time. The Mushroomancer unit - a Tribe-Kin support class that poisons areas or heals allies with mushroom spores - and the Scrapper Engineer who deploys turrets are the kind of specific, weird unit design that make squad-building worth experimenting with. Steam reviews sit at a mixed 56 percent from a small sample, which reflects a real split: fans of the genre tend to rate it higher, solo players who hit the difficulty curve tend to bounce off.

Fred · Scout Team

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