Showgunners

Showgunners doesn’t let a clutter of subsystems distract it from its main focus, which is to deliver a series of intense and varied turn-based battles in an atmosphere that neatly fits the genre – it’s not revolutionary and you won’t find yourself replaying the game again and again. Those looking for exactly that, however – a well-defined and very competent experience – will get their money’s worth.

Showgunners has its fair share of new ideas, and it's best when it uses them. Moving around the world to find useful rewards adds an additional, relatively low stress, layer to a solid tactics experience. Meeting new contestants and fans, who are varied, expands the world and those that live in it. Inside combat, a lot will feel familiar to tactics veterans, but fresh elements are at least complex enough to sustain a playthrough. Forgoing procedural generation in contestants, defenders, and levels limits replayability, but it also eliminates pressure. You will never lose your favorite playable contestant for good because of a miscalculation. Their worst fate is a battle restart. Once the season is over, it's hard not to imagine the next as one with a plethora of characters who could be knocked out of competition for good, but the first season is at least good enough to leave you wanting a second.

A fun strategy video game bent on spontaneously breaking the rigid rules of the genre.

A pared back turn-based strategy that successfully replicates the action of XCOM but is so lacking in originality and variety it feels like half the game it could have been.