Laser Squad Nemesis Review

If you’ve been playing strategy games for some time, you probably remember X-COM: UFO Defense. It was a turn-based tactical strategy game that put you in charge of Earth’s defenses against invading aliens. It was the first game of its kind and provided challenging gameplay, so it was a hit with strategy gamers at the time and planted itself in their memories. The team responsible for that game has now returned years later to bring us Laser Squad Nemesis, another turn-based, tactical strategy game. However, not a lot has changed for the team over the years and Nemesis is not a modern reworking of X-COM, but rather a game inspired by X-COM’s battle component. Nemesis features an improved interface over its predecessor, but the graphics, presentation, and overall gameplay are decidedly old fashioned.

Nemesis features four different races to battle each other. The Marines are the human faction and feature battle armor clad warriors armed with laser weapons. The Greys are the alien race of human abducting and probing fame and bring powers of mind control to the battlefield. The Machina are robotic machines that can pack a powerful offensive punch. Lastly, the Spawn are swarming insectoids ala StarCraft’s Zerg. The races are well-balanced and each lends itself to a different strategy and style of play.

The game’s single player component features a campaign for each, but these are essentially a series of missions introduced by a paragraph or two of text to provide a minimalist story. Each mission opens with a deployment phase in which you spend points from your allotted total to purchase units and place them within your starting area on the map. Of course more powerful units cost more points and so you’ll need to make a quality versus quantity decision during deployment. The decision isn’t too hard to make, though, as each side only has six different unit types available. There is no research in the game and so no tech tree, so what you see at the beginning of the first mission is what you’ll get before every mission.

Once your units are deployed the mission begins. Play is turn-based, but the action is carried out in real time. This accomplished by dividing your turn into orders and execution phases. During the orders phase you can give any or all of your units their orders for the upcoming execution phase. This can be any combination of movement and fire orders as well as setting orders of engagement to do things like take all opportunities to fire at the enemy or to run if an enemy is encountered. The execution phase will take place over 10 seconds of real time, so the number of orders that you can issue depends on what the unit can carry out subject to this time constraint.

The orders phase sounds simple enough, but it can actually get to be pretty complicated. At issue is the need to coordinate the actions of all of your units as they execute their orders in real time. If you’re not very careful, once the action starts you may have units walking into friendly fire or getting stuck in doorways Three Stooges style. To help manage the coordination between your units, the game provides VCR like controls that allow you to watch your units executing the orders you’ve given without committing to them. You can play, rewind, pause, etc. as you make sure that your units will carry off a well-coordinated attack before you move on to the execution phase. This can be a very time-consuming process, to say the least. In fact, you’ll spend just about all of your play time coordinating units actions during the order phase, with brief intervals of action served up ten seconds at a time. If you’re not very methodical and very patient, you’ll very quickly lose interest in the game due to its extremely slow pacing.

Even with the most meticulous planning the execution phase can produce unexpected results. For example, you may carefully set up a crossfire on an enemy unit only to see it turn and walk around a corner at the very start of the turn. With there target gone, these units may just stand around for the rest of the phase, costing them an entire turn. This is especially frustrating because the computer AI likes to move units around incessantly often giving you the impression that they are moving for the sake of moving as opposed to executing any kind of strategy. This can lead to games that break down into chase and shoot missions and the ever popular exercise of trying to hunt down the location of the last enemy unit so that you can finally end the mission.

In addition to the campaign missions, the game supports multiplayer games in either hotseat or play by email mode. While these have the advantage of providing you with tougher human competition, since you now need to wait for two people to meticulously plot out each of their turns the game length increases by quite a margin. Don’t expect to get through a hotseat game in one sitting or play by email games to be completed in a matter of days.

Nemesis is not a bad game in and of itself, but its design makes it an extremely slow playing game by today’s standards. It will appeal more to older gamers with a fondness for turn-based strategy games and a lot of patience. If you’re not in this niche then you’re probably better off looking for your strategy gaming entertainment elsewhere.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 68%.  It takes a very methodical and patient strategy gamer to appreciate Laser Squad Nemesis.