Battle Brothers Is Like A Medieval Jagged Alliance
Also werewolf and vampire tactics
Battle Brothers is what we call Adam and John when they get into the crawl space together and start causing a ruckus. But it's also the name of a turn-based strategy game which takes its cues from Jagged Alliance and XCOM. You lead a squad of mercenaries around a procedurally generated worldmap, get in fights for money, and level up your squad. It's still in development, but there's a new trailer and a demo linked below which give some idea of its potential boardgame-y charms.
Every time I try to write 'Battle Brothers' I accidentally type out 'Blood Brothers' and I don't know why.
From the game's Steam Greenlight page:
The game consists of a strategical layer, or worldmap, and a tactical combat layer. On the worldmap you can choose where to travel next in order to find places worth looting, enemies worth pursuing or towns to resupply and hire men at. This is also where you manage, level up and equip your troops and chose the next target of your traveling party. Once you move close to an enemy force or potentially dangerous place you will switch to the tactical combat map where the actual fighting takes place. Both the worldmap and the combat maps are procedurally generated so no two playthroughs will ever be alike.
If this sounds like your kind of thing as much as it sounds like my kind of thing, there's an early combat demo available for those who want to discover what the fighting might feel like. It's obviously just a thin slice of what the trailer outlines though.
Given that it's an indie game and thus far incomplete, does that mean that a Kickstarter campaign is just around the corner? Thank goodness, it appears not. Over at IndieDB, the team said back in March that they're instead aiming for early access. I don't have a problem with Kickstarter, but it's nice when a few games don't make it a de facto part of their development plan.
Not yet ready to commit to that demo download? The game's TIGSource devlog has plenty of more information about features and design decisions.