Narcos: Rise of the Cartels

Narcos: Rise of the Cartels is a turn-based tactical game developed by Kuju and published by Curve Digital, released in November 2019. It adapts the first season of Netflix's Narcos, putting you in command of either a DEA squad led by Agent Murphy or the cartel side under El Patron's lieutenants. The core loop is grid-based: you pick missions from a strategic map, assemble a squad of up to five units from five distinct classes, and fight through tactical skirmishes. The Specialist brings explosives, the Sicario runs close-range shotgun work, the Enforcer dishes SMG fire that can hit multiple targets, the Lookout carries a pistol, and the Mercenary wields a machine gun. Units level up, unlock skill trees with over 50 abilities, and die permanently if they drop to zero health mid-mission - so roster management and keeping soldiers alive does carry real stakes. The two mechanics that genuinely separate this from a vanilla XCOM clone are worth flagging. The Counteraction system lets you spend banked counteract points to drop into a real-time third-person view and shoot at enemies moving through your line of sight. The Kill Shot fires similarly when an enemy is on the verge of death, triggering a slow-motion execution window. Both inject a brief pulse of action into what is otherwise a slow, methodical game, and for a first-time tactical player they remove some of the abstraction that makes the genre feel cold. The war room between missions is clean and well laid out, mission objectives vary across escort, assassination, hostage rescue, and intel-gathering types, and live-action clips from the Netflix show are used sparingly to stitch together the narrative. Now, the problems, and there are enough of them to matter. The single biggest structural issue is that you control only one unit per turn. From a pure decision-making standpoint, this dismantles most of what makes squad tactics interesting: no coordinated flanking, no suppression plays, no multi-unit gambits. The rhythm collapses into a trading sequence with the AI. Speaking of the AI - it is inconsistent. Enemy units sometimes walk directly into point-blank shotgun range, waste moves retreating back and forth, or skip turns entirely during rescue objectives. There are no custom difficulty sliders, no in-mission save checkpoints, and the two campaigns are largely cosmetic mirrors of each other - same maps recycled, same class archetypes under different faction names, same mission structures. Repetition sets in hard past the mid-campaign mark, and there is no mod ecosystem or post-launch update support worth noting. For the target audience - fans of the Netflix show who want casual contact with the XCOM genre without the cognitive overhead of a full Firaxis campaign - the production values hold up reasonably well. The Unreal Engine environments capture 1980s Colombia with solid lighting and recognisable locations. Voice acting and sound design draw faithfully from the show's tone. For anyone already invested in tactics games though, this sits well below Mutant Year Zero, Into the Breach, or the XCOM series it is so clearly modelled on. The depth of the decision tree is thin, the AI punishes you inconsistently rather than cleverly, and two campaigns that share the same map pool and skill trees do not add meaningful replayability. If you have never touched a tactics game and the Narcos IP is the hook, Rise of the Cartels is a workable on-ramp. The one-unit-per-turn rule is polarising, but it does keep the moment-to-moment readable, and permadeath adds just enough pressure to make you think. Just go in knowing the ceiling is low and the repetition arrives earlier than it should.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

Be the first to comment on Narcos: Rise of the Cartels.