Ground Breakers announced, in paid beta

Erik Johnson of Vietnamese indie studio United Indie writes in to announce a turn-based sci-fi tactics game by the name of Ground Breakers.

The narrative premise:

A few centuries after the apocalypse, ice in the two poles have melted and the earth has no land left. Disorder and riot occurs everywhere. Governments were destroyed. People built giant cubes and linked them together to have a place to live on. Minerals became rare and hold much value. All the big corporates and organizations rise to powers and start to trade, research robot run by water to dominate mineral rich areas.

That said, per the developers, the single player campaign mode in Ground Breakers is event-driven rather than story-driven: “Campaign use dynamic events instead of linear story. Each play will follow different event flows which skyrocket the replayabilities. EG. Kidnap event, Judgement day event.”

The developers have also opted to eschew a traditional class system, instead giving you command of individually customizable robots.

As for the battles themselves, this trailer should give you the idea:

Here’s the full feature list:

• The game features a single player campaign and multiplayer matches.
• Test your wit in traditional tactic matches with 15+ types of different robots with many skills to toy with. More to come!
• Wreak havoc while flexibly adapting to the 5+ types of ever changing battlegrounds.
• Position your robots, capture important points and high grounds, protecting the fortress, protecting the key robot and so on…
• Tweak your robots with chips. Collect chips with different shapes which you will have to arrange them in the board in the best way possible to maximize your robot’s abilities.
• Expand your robot army by destroying the enemy’s robots and win some parts to craft new robots. Each robot has a different recipe and what parts you will get is pure luck.
• Compete against other players in online battles and climb the leaderboard.
• Expand your army, mostly by force, or by diplomacy or money.
• Fight your way though the non-linear world domination campaign, face opponents with far superior equipment

Final release is planned for April 2016; but in the meantime, Ground Breakers is currently available on Steam Early Access for $9.99. Windows, Mac, and Linux.