All Walls Must Fall announced

Jan David Hassel writes in to announce All Walls Must Fall, a “tech-noir” isometric tactics game with RPG elements and clear XCOM inspiration now being developed by Berlin indie studio inbetweengames.

All Walls Must Fall is set in future, alternate-reality Cold War Germany, and features an appropriately paranoid cyberpunk premise to go along with the setting:

Berlin, November 2089 – For 150 years of Cold War both sides have used temporal technology to counter each other’s every move. But this deadly love is finally coming to an end as a rogue nuclear strike has both sides sending agents back in time to find out who did it and how to prevent it before everything turns to ash forever. Over the course of a journey that jumps and loops through a single night in the city, players will unravel the conspiracy keeping East and West locked in struggle and oppression. As lines between factions become blurred, choices become difficult. Which side to play? Who to side with? When both time and free will are an illusion – who can you really trust? Will your actions tear down the wall, bring stability, or perpetuate a cycle of war and terror? In the end all walls must fall.

AWMF employs a real-time-with-pause combat system where unit actions are timed to the beat of the game’s music. AWMF will also include stealth and persuasion mechanics, meaning you’re not locked into combat as the sole means to achieve mission objectives.

You can get a sense of how this game will play from the teaser trailer:

Now, about those missions–the developers state that each campaign will be procedurally generated when you start a new game:

A single campaign consists of a number of missions, taking place in the same night in Berlin. Missions are not scripted, but give you a clear goal. It’s up to you to decide on how to best achieve it within the sandbox of a Berlin nightclub. A single campaign will take a few hours to play through, but each one will contain different missions and may have different outcomes.

Hassel tells me that the game’s assortment of RPG elements is rather limited at the moment, in that “the RPG progression mechanics we have in the game are buying of new weapons and time manipulation abilities. You pay for these with a time resource that you collect for fulfilling missions and doing thing[s] within them.” He states that they intend to add more RPG progression mechanics in later, but it’s not clear right now what those might be.

All Walls Must Fall is now on Kickstarter, where it’s well on its way to being funded. The game is being developed for Windows and Mac, with a closed alpha coming in May and a planned Early Access release this fall.