Recon Control

My first instinct when I saw the side-scrolling 2D art was to file this one under 'curiosity' and move on. That instinct was wrong. Recon Control is a tactical turn-based game that drops its maps into a side-on platformer perspective instead of the usual top-down grid, and that single design choice changes almost everything about how you read a battlefield. Verticality is a real factor here: balconies, stairwells, and doorways create choke points that reward patient positioning over raw firepower, and because enemies stream in from the sides rather than swarming from all directions, you can actually engineer fair fights if you play smart. The numbers backbone is more solid than the visual style suggests. You pick a squad of up to four soldiers from a roster of eight, and the survivors carry their experience forward through 25 missions split across three campaigns. The skill tree holds 50 abilities covering active, passive, and unlockable secret slots, so you can spec a dedicated breacher differently from a suppression specialist. On top of that, the equipment catalog runs to 57 items - weapons, body armor, explosives, and picklocks among them - which gives each pre-mission loadout screen real decision weight. The campaign map offers branching paths to the final mission, so route selection matters in a mild roguelite-adjacent way rather than a strict linear march. The difficulty is not negotiable at the default setting, and the tutorial is essentially non-existent. Reviewers who came in expecting a light action game reported genuine shock at how fast a poorly positioned squad gets dismantled. The correct approach is to treat every doorway as a potential funnel, keep your soldiers behind cover, and bait enemies in one at a time rather than pushing forward. Once that clicks, the AP economy feels genuinely tight and satisfying rather than arbitrary. For players who want more suffering, Ironman mode removes any safety net and is the recommended second-run mode for people who want to feel the permadeath pressure properly. The weaknesses are real but narrow. Key rebinding is absent or limited, which will frustrate non-QWERTY keyboard users. There is no built-in tutorial, so your first couple of missions are a self-directed crash course in getting your squad killed. The audio is functional rather than memorable, and the 16-bit-style visuals serve readability more than atmosphere. These are small-studio compromises rather than design failures, and none of them undercut the core loop. The Steam community sits at around 80 percent positive across roughly 90 reviews, which for a low-profile solo-dev tactics game is a meaningful signal. It is not a long game - 25 missions is modest - but the Ironman run and branching paths give a second playthrough a different texture. Strategy players who regularly clear XCOM on Ironman or finished Into the Breach's harder islands will find this familiar territory at a comfortable budget entry point. It genuinely respects your time: sessions are short, decisions are dense, and nothing is padded. Go in knowing there is no hand-holding, get the cover mechanics into muscle memory fast, and you will find a lean, focused tactics game that delivers more decision-making per session than many triple-A releases three times its size.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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