Vigilantes

I have a soft spot for games that resist the easy fantasy shortcut, and Vigilantes earns points immediately by dropping you into Reiker, a rain-soaked, crime-choked city with zero alien invasions, zero orcs, and zero convenient magic systems. You play as Sam Contino, an ordinary citizen who witnesses one crime too many and recruits a crew of damaged, street-level allies - a frustrated cop, a down-on-his-luck detective, a vengeance-driven woman, an unhinged firefighter - each with a voiced intro and a believable reason to be doing this. That grounded setup does a lot of work when your actual tools are baseball bats, burst-fire SMGs, and interrogation sessions. The mechanical core is action-point squad combat recognizable to anyone who logged hours in Jagged Alliance 2 or the original X-COM. You field up to three party members, manage AP across movement, aimed shots, overwatch, attacks of opportunity, and body-part targeting that trades accuracy for extra damage or status effects. Weapons are meaningfully differentiated: a katana plays nothing like a shotgun with cone-of-fire spread, and a sniper rifle demands a very different positioning game than a pistol paired with a first-aid kit in the second slot. Outside of combat, you run surveillance on city districts to expose gang operations, interrogate captured criminals to crawl up the chain of command toward faction bosses, and manage a five-facility base - Workshop, Gym, Firing Range, Surgery, Library - that feeds crafting options and passive buffs back into your squad. The UPLIFT character system uses skill-use progression rather than raw XP, with six core stats, nine skills, and over 60 perks giving you genuine build variety across melee specialists, gunslingers, and support-oriented builds. The gangs also level up while you do, spending their own resources on training and rackets, and will dispatch lieutenants to ambush you if you start winning too decisively. That dynamic pressure prevents the game from becoming a static checklist. Where Vigilantes stumbles is well-documented by its community: the UI is clunky and overloaded with tabs, early-game battles are too simple to build tension, and the absence of fog of war makes combat encounters more predictable than they should be. Enemy AI has moments where it just idles under pressure rather than adapting. The story is pulpy and atmospheric in tone but is front-loaded - character relationships don't deepen meaningfully through the campaign, and interactions between squad members essentially stop once the intro missions are done. Reviewers clock the campaign around 12 hours on a first run, which is short for the genre even if the generated mission pool extends that runtime. The developer has since acknowledged these criticisms explicitly, using them as the foundation for a more RPG-heavy follow-up. None of this makes Vigilantes unplayable - it makes it a focused, combat-first tactical experience rather than a genre cornerstone. For strategy and tactics players comfortable with smaller-scope indie productions, the game holds up as a well-built if limited entry. The neo-noir crime setting is genuinely rare in this genre, the combat feedback is satisfying, and the UPLIFT system rewards players who think carefully about build synergies before missions escalate. If you have never touched a game in this lineage, the early missions are simple enough to serve as an actual on-ramp without hand-holding you into boredom permanently. The AI and UI issues are real ceilings, but for the asking price and the niche it occupies, Vigilantes is a competent and atmospherically distinct choice - just go in expecting a scrappy indie punching at a genre, not a genre-defining release. Diego, Scout Team

Valve rates this game Steam Deck Playable.

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