Caltrops - What Are You Playing Right Now?

Forum Overview :: What Are You Playing Right Now?

by Roop 07/20/2025, 9:05pm PDT

It's a turn-based tactics game like Jagged Alliance or Pheonix Point with a base you upgrade that looks eerily similar to the one you had back in XCOM. You're a Cyber Knight, can only play one of these and can't die or it ends the game. You pick and lead a team of mercenaries taking jobs for gangs or corrupt corpos in a cyber city setting. I thought I was done with these kinds of tactics games, actually, so debated even buying it. Got bored with the slog of Pheonix Point and the Sniper Rifle fest and irritating characters in the last Jagged Alliance, found the XCOMs haven't really aged that well either. But here--I'm really enjoying this one, had it since late June (a week or so after its release), finished two games now and as I was finishing this last game, found myself making plans for the next one.

There's eleven classes so even some I still haven't tried yet. It's like all the character classes to experiment with from a desktop Shadowrun or Cyberpunk but meets a PC tactics game (I read today apparently the setting, New Boston Zone, is based on tabletop games the devs ran). You have eleven classes with skill trees I've only seen in RPGs, big trees with three sections you work your way up through, so there's a lot of freedom to experiment, especially since you can easily multiclass, come up with your own overpowered builds. Or maybe not, but it's easy enough to respec back, you get limited respecs per month, tied to one of the rooms you can upgrade. I like the skill trees, you can go up and then across, so high level skills aren't locked off.

You clear junk and build the rooms, and you don't have enough space to build every kind of room, so you have that to decide, and then you can upgrade every room 5 or so levels so there's always upgrading going on, managing your contacts. They can be corrupt corpos with missions to give or doctors for healing or augmenting body parts, splicers and gunrunners, more shit like that so you'll end up with a big list of contacts. You're always sending individual mercs on special legwork missions for the contacts, they'll be gone a week usually, and you'll earn influence with the contact probably. You're trying to level up contacts with influence, get the gunrunners to sell better guns, get better cyberware or cyberdecks or cybersnacks. So just a lot happening between missions, and I didn't even mention nanofabbing weapons.

It was early access and feels like it still is sometimes, but only because it's constantly getting surprise updates. But good updates. Since I've played, they've added a couple new classes and new high level enemies unique to the two bigger corps you're always fighting. They plan on the mercenaries on your team having missions to resolve their backstories, I'm looking forward to that. There seems to be so many skills devoted to dealing with drones, I think they're adding flying drones or something. The skills work against androids but I just shoot them. Anyway other than that it feels like a finished game. I've had no bugs or if there were there was a hotfix.