The game is meant to accurately simulate ancient battles, back when warriors were positioned on giant square grids and took turns moving one at a time. The developer is Byzantine Games- an accurate description, if "byzantine" means excessively complicated. Actually the basics of the game are very simple, and you CAN just move your spearmanii around and have fights happen. The complexity only comes in if you actually want to understand why things are happening, or figure out where the obtuse and absurd ZOC rules will actually let you move. Imagine a cavalry unit being FROZEN IN PLACE because an enemy infantry unit moved next to it. The cavalry unit has three bad options: 1. charge, probably lose, and then perhaps "fall back" a square, or not, depending what the GAME wants to do, and then the infantry will take a step forward again on its turn and you can do this all over, 2. "Fall back" a square or two, take a cohesion test (very bad) for falling back in charge range, and then the infantry moves forward again on its turn, 3. rotate and get charged in the rear (also very bad).

There is not a "rock-paper-scissors" balancing but instead units have different tags which give them different advantages, expressed as "points of advantage". These tags are not intuitive and it requires the use of several charts to divine how many points of advantage one unit will have against another, and net POA also changes depending on the terrain, cohesion state, and unit HP.

It is at least a better game than Pike and Shot, but Pike and Shot was also incredibly frustrating because the historical battles were often so one-sided, while the historical battles in base FOG2 are pretty evenly matched and you can play both sides in each battle except for Carrhae.

Seems to be a fairly boring-to-mediocre, janky shooter with some small rpg elements: a sort of binary morality system (serve the public vs uphold the law) supported by some dialog choices, a sparse upgrade tree with a couple non-combat options, and a primary gun that can be upgraded with stat boost things.

You can carry two guns, your primary automatic pistol with infinite ammo, and one gun at a time dropped by enemies. These are the standard shooter game 9mm pistol, subgun, ak-74.

The voice acting is strange. I recognize some of the voice actors from children's cartoons and anime. In the first mission, every one of the dozens of punks you fight has the same goofy voice (I think it's Green Goblin from Spidey and Friends, a show for two year olds). The voice actors are ok but they're badly miscast, the script is derivative and flat, and the dramatic timing in the cutscenes is all wrong. The worst example of the miscasted voice acting was a scraggly-bearded teenager high on drugs in an arcade bathroom stall, voiced by that person who plays the annoying little boy characters in every anime dub these days. One of the cops has that voice too. Keep in mind that these are the voices you hear while hostages are being executed and people are dying of drug overdoses.

The VA thing is a shame because the game actually *looks* great as an urban hellhole simulator, and it's maybe the best run-down city I've seen in a game, but hearing the same VA's who do Super Kitties and Spidey and Friends undercuts the mood.

The performance is also very bad. It took some fiddling just to get the game to start, which seems to be a common problem in the forums.

best game in the JA series by far

Great game until it makes you sign up with EA and launch through EA instead of steam! Unacceptable!

Excellent game to play local coop with a wife/girlfriend. Highly recommend.

Better, more intense tactical combat than nu-Xcom. The best character building I've ever seen in an RPG, encouraging you to constantly respec to try new things. I hope other RPGs are inspired by Troubleshooter's character building system.

It's not a real RPG. It's a really, really good turn-based squad combat game with pointless filler in between the battles. Probably the best turn-based squad combat game there is, honestly.

The early battles are some of the hardest in the game so don't get discouraged.

Actually pretty good and pretty hard. You need to keep moving constantly, covering your reloads with well-timed gun switches or melee attacks. A good design decision is that there are zombies that steal your guns so you can't always rely on your favorite weapon.

Small complaints: you can't rebind the controls? You need to cycle through your guns, melees and secondaries at the start of every (2-3 minute) mission to get the ones you want each time. The peepoo zombies sometimes put you in an annoying peepoo death spiral where you can't see them to stop them from peepooing you. Maybe these problems will work themselves out as I git gud.

Panzer General clone. You can get a lot of time out of just the free missions. A lot of that time is spent watching animation. There is a slider to increase movement anim speed but not combat animations.

More tedious than Panzer General. Missions seem to tend towards slowly slogging through the enemy while falling back often to repair your guys. There is a supply route system that is never actually useful because if you can cut an enemy off from supply you would have been able to kill him anyway.

Garbage. The starting party can't successfully cast a spell or penetrate the armor on the most basic bandits. Some people might find that kind of crap fun but I don't.