Tactical Combat Department (PC)

Clumsy, lazily cobbled together, and not really doing anything. These are just a few words I was able to come up with when it came to playing more than a few moments of Tactical Combat Department. In the runup to the most recent Steam Next Fest, I was quite excited by this one. It is a tactical swat-style game where you go into generic-looking locations and try to neutralize the targets. Sounds interesting on paper, then the demo was available and it appears that many of the promises were just lies.

I argue this most of the time, but if you are developing a PC game, for the love of God, allow me to force the game into a windowed mode. At the very least, let me pick between my monitors which one will the game be on. That should be the easiest thing for anyone to do. If you can change the resolution you should be able to enable or disable fullscreen modes. On a wider scope, maybe allow me to choose if my mouse is inverted or not. While in a mission, let me open the menu to turn off the music (which I’ll get to in a second). Finally, what are low, medium, and high doing in terms of quality?

It would be teasing to not immediately talk about the music issue I just hinted at, so let’s talk about it. Online there are these sites that aggregate creative commons and license-free music for use in projects such as games, YouTube videos, and otherwise. They are a great tool for creators to employ when searching for something specific or to find something generic that fits. One of these sites is called Audio Jungle, and much like Shutterstock with images, they utilize a form of watermarking in their preview content so they can force you into paying them for the copyright to actually use their work. Within two minutes of the first mission, I had to abandon the game as half the lyrics (sarcasm) are “Audio Jungle.”

Can you see why I opened with “Clumsy” and “cobbled together” yet? Let’s move on to the third of things I listed, uninteresting. Gameplay, despite the text dump of a tutorial attempt to convey complexity, is fairly straightforward if you’ve ever played a turn-based game in your life. I’ve seen Pokémon games with slightly more convoluted systems, and that’s only because the beauty pageant in Diamond and Pearl can get in the bin. You click on your men, there is an area they can move in, you select the place with the most cover/that is closest to your goal, and you repeat until you can start using your guns to fire. The whole thing is very simple.

Now, I hope beyond hope that this is a bug, but after engaging with targets, sometimes they’d just turn invisible. Oh, how I wish I was joking about this. There was one instance where I kicked the door down, walked into a room, and was shot from the darkness that my bloke was pointing at. I then used other units to search the room. They also got shot, but there was no one else in there… aside from the invisible bloke standing right in the middle of the room. How do I know he was there? When I shot him he reappeared as if it was magic. I think he stole Harry’s cloak to sneak into the bathroom.

I think that beyond obvious bugs and lack of polish/any work being done, there could be a decent idea under it all. It isn’t a great one, nor is it genre-defining, but it could be something small and fun to play for a short while that you’d enjoy if the price was low. As it is, the gameplay is frustrating. Multiple times I’d clicked on a door or something else to interact with it, and when trying to click away, the game assumed I’d clicked on one of the tiny buttons. The mouse was half the screen away and apparently, I’m still wanting to mase a bloke in the doorway. No, I want to back up out of that menu.

Between the unprofessional nature of using the preview tracks from a site that collects stock music/creative commons music, the rough way it stumbles about like closing time at the pubs on a Saturday night, generally nothing really makes it fun. I don’t understand why this was a demo this early. At best, this is someone’s first project to show proof of concept to a publisher, but somehow it was released into general consumption. I’d have liked to have been far more positive, but this was nothing short of a mess.