New release: Enemy

Tom Johnson writes in to announce the release of Enemy, a squad-based tactical RPG modeled in large part on X-COM and Jagged Alliance.

The narrative is fairly minimal, set in a self-consciously video gamey world:

Four evil kings (a cyclops, a slime, a vampire, and a rogue AI) are terrorizing the land and a squad of classic game heroes bands together to put a stop to it. The name of the land is never given, but there are four types of areas within it: a tropical zone based on classic action games, a forest inspired by classic adventure games, a swamp inspired by classic horror games, and a plains inspired by classic platformers.

You start the game with one player-created character and two procedurally generated recruits with randomly chosen classes and attributes, and can recruit more characters (including 10 uniques and an unlimited supply of randomly generated townspeople). Though most characters are generated by the game, you can guide the progression of all characters upon level up by assigning skill points among eight skills (melee, ranged, bomb, throw, health, mind, endurance, and reaction).

There is a procedurally generated overworld that you can direct your squad around and explore. Meanwhile, combat takes place in turn-based fashion with time units a la X-COM. The main attraction here, in the dev’s own words, is that “[e]verything in the environment is dynamic: roofs collapse, trees topple, and fire spreads out of control, so you are always veering from one disaster to the next.”

The trailer shows what this looks like in practice:

The price of complexity and dynamism, it seems, is that everything must be rendered in voxels. No matter: this looks promising, and I imagine I’ll be checking it out shortly.

Enemy appears to be available exclusively through Steam; $14.99 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.