Home Behind 2

My spreadsheet instincts kicked in hard the moment I saw 36 unlockable jobs, a base-building camp, procedurally generated zones, and a vehicular combat layer. On paper, Home Behind 2 reads like a mid-budget Darkest Dungeon set against a fictional Middle Eastern civil war, and that framing is both its biggest selling point and the source of most of its disappointment. The structural bones are genuinely interesting. You pick a starting job - Commando, Sniper, Medic, Scout, among others - and build a four-person rebel squad. Each slot in your formation carries positional bonuses or penalties, so party composition does matter: a tank up front, a damage dealer behind, a healer in the third slot, and a high-damage ranged unit anchoring the rear is the meta that the community has settled on, and for good reason. Resources like fuel, stone, and batteries are scavenged on the march through procedurally generated terrain, and your base camp handles the meta-progression layer: cooking food, crafting armor, researching technologies, and unlocking the broader job roster. On the strategy side of the loop, there is something here worth chewing on. The combat is where the numbers stop adding up. The game markets a real-time pausable battle system, but in practice most fights resolve in seconds and the pause function rarely changes outcomes. You equip your fighters before the engagement, click the fight button, and watch the animation play out. Weapons range from WWII relics to rocket launchers and flamethrowers, and the loot variety is genuine, but gearing checks matter far more than moment-to-moment decisions. Vehicular combat encounters - mounted machine guns, armored convoys - can end a full run through RNG alone, which is the hardest pill to swallow when you have six hours invested in a save file. The permadeath stakes feel punishing in the wrong way: not because your decisions failed, but because a dice roll decided to. The writing deserves more credit than most reviewers give it. The story threads a grey-area morality through the revolution - the dictator Akadullah came to power through a popular uprising himself, the foreign powers backing your rebels are transparently after Scaria's oil, and the methods your own side uses are rarely clean. That political cynicism surfaces in skill descriptions and mission text as much as in the main narrative, and it gives the world texture that a lot of indie roguelikes skip entirely. The tutorial, however, does not surface the game's mechanical depth well; a lot of interactions are undocumented and only become clear after a failed run or a trip to the Steam forums. For a strategy-focused player, the honest assessment is this: the decision space lives in camp upgrades, job selection, route planning, and pre-combat loadouts - not in the combat itself. If you can accept that framing and treat this as a resource-management roguelite with an engaging political setting, there are enough runs in here to justify the time. If you came expecting tactical depth on the level of Darkest Dungeon or WARSAW, the auto-battler reality will feel like a bait-and-switch. The Steam community sits at roughly 78 percent positive over its lifetime, which tracks - fans of the specific loop rate it well, but it is a niche loop.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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