Rally Point: Complex urban warfare game Khaligrad is a low-intensity strategy game that can be played in this year's scorching heat

I was biased against a scrappy strategy game, even before the idiot billionaires were destroying the planet and England in mind-burning heat, when you thought we were going to get away with it this year. Khaligrad is pretty scrappy. It's rough around the edges and you have to figure it out yourself, but it's more intuitive than it looks and easy to use once you understand some of the basics. It's also scrappy because, well, it's Stalingrad. It's not: its world is so fictional that it's set in the 15th century. But the occupiers are clearly fascists, and the defenders are communists engaged in a long and brutal quasi-guerrilla urban warfare with World War II technology. Thankfully, it's free of any real pretensions or genocidal acting beyond both sides doing “hail the empire/to the union” bits as a sign.

I guess that's why, despite its brutal and challenging setting, this year's entry in the tradition of Low Intensity Strategy Games is Why Please Stop When It's Hot You Can't See My Pleading Tears Because They're Evaporating.

To command troops to find enemy remains in Haligrad.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Orbi Universo Team

UI. First I have to talk about the UI. Your view is top down on the same old battle hexes and your click controls are a bit inefficient but basically good. But there are no keyboard controls at all. scrollThe reflex to ignore it (on the grounds that neglecting something so basic has a strong correlation with an overall worn-out design) passes, because its maps are so small and… well, fine.

As invaders or defenders, you get two campaigns of around ten (I think always ten, but I'm not sure) missions each, usually about gaining a foothold in enemy territory or defending your own, although sometimes there's a more free-range skirmish or battle-sweep. Almost all units are infantry, but instead of general attack and defence ratings or stats, each unit is made up of as many individual soldiers as you can cram into it, with a limit of up to 20, plus two embedded specialists (who can't be recruited, but are sometimes sent by higher-ups). Somewhat similarly to Songs Of Conquest, you can split soldiers across multiple units to give the enemy more and smaller targets to spend their time attacking. The cost of this, however, is that you'll have less intensive attacking to do yourself, as each “attack” action means one shot from each soldier.

Worse, it's more expensive. You convert all the supplies you earn between missions (it's unclear how this is calculated, but it seems pretty consistent with your performance) into usable resources. Food is needed on a logical basis per soldier, medicine for those already wounded, and you can even send soldiers or entire units unarmed, either to scavenge on the battlefield or risk melee attacks (or ambushes if you hide in a building the enemy has entered). But every unit requires fuel, and more as the weather gets colder. New soldiers are pretty cheap, but you have to arm them later, and there's no HQ to hide the exhausted ones. Everyone comes with you. But you can avoid any of these because of the costs in morale, health, and effectiveness.

Defending the area with a flame-breathing tank in Haligrad.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Orbi Universo Team

Both sides tend to get different specialists, with notzis getting morale-raising nobles and enemy-intimidating “butchers”, while communists get more scavengers and defensive-focused engineers and scouts. They add their effects to their units rather than any special attacks (with one or two minor exceptions), so they still play the same, although there's a slight hint of pragmatism and corruption towards elite training. The missions and armies are small enough that none of them are really that complicated in practice – you can rarely field more than a handful of units (adding more is free, but the fuel cost split leaves them clearly doomed if you overdo it), so even with specialists the decision is usually still “move, scout or dig”. Even hitting tanks only requires sustained fire – the animation is rifle shots bouncing off armour, somehow killing a crew member at maybe 4%, but that “ammunition” includes molotovs and makeshift grenades. Tanks never once ruin the fun of playing as infantry!

Refreshingly, you can fire before moving, or you can fire on your turn and fire once without having to choose. Pumping ammo is often worth it too; this isn’t an XCOM sniping contest, but it’s one where you’ll probably still die if you don’t get the 11%. As in real combat, most shots are expected to miss, but the volume of shots can force you to fire several times, and each dead or wounded enemy reduces their ability to respond. Even misses can shake an enemy’s resolve. But this isn’t Stalingrad, so ammo is scarce, and getting them back in combat involves holding a round of positions in a place that’s likely to be covered in loot, which is a terrible place to wait.

Armies tend to shrink and become more desperate in combat, and even a victory could mean ending up with dozens of rounds of scattered remnants trading three or four rounds, or finding that even after a single tank's death, absorbing 50 rounds (an excellent detail) was worth more than its wildly variable damage output. It reminded me oddly of Foxhole, as you wander through a devastated city at the bitter end of a hopeless battle, scavenging for supplies, hunting down stray invaders, and covering one another's backs as we all freestyled our way through the porous mess that was once the front line.

You are reading a letter ordering you to eliminate fascist snipers in Haligrad.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Orbi Universo Team

The AI ​​was more active and unpredictable than I expected, sometimes turning a corner and getting a brutal 22 x 65% hit chance (and probably a full kill chance, those are bullets, not -5hp tokens), but sometimes firing where they thought you were. In one mission most of their army was out in the open, on the edge of the map, instead of occupying territory that I was going to liberate. The next turn they started blindly firing at tank traps that they hoped I was charging after one of my units got into their line of sight and quickly retreated. They took a gamble!

It didn't work, because I made an unusually reckless charge at the target, leaving them very exposed when one of my tanks blocked their path (and also giving my infantry cover to finish the job). But if There was If they had taken a different approach, or perhaps not placed that scout in the unit, it might have won them the war.

But the seriousness of the situation is not one-sided. There are ups and downs in operations. Barely holding out in a fight with 17 men and a blinded, immobile tank can put off new recruits (43 soldiers reported to have reached the second level, but only 7 reached the third level, too many people (killed) and even the weather isn't a one-way trip in Endless Legend.

But most refreshingly, its campaigns are somewhat dynamic. Instead of instantly ending your game, it'll even let you fail here and there because everything in the universe has to be a bloody roguelike, like we're sitting here throwing Milhousing coins into a slot. Intermission letters from command will berate you, but, you know, this is war. You'll lose a few fights. Not only that, failure leads to different missions and supply/recruitment situations in between. Sure, there aren't many maps, but when I failed a mission and was explicitly told I had to retake the bridge where everyone was brutally beaten a few missions ago, I was impressed.

As Empire Strikes Back appears on screen, an explosion occurs in Haligrad in the background.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun/Orbi Universo Team

It was a stroke of skill on the part of an obscure developer to contextualize it this way, and I'm here for more campaigns that use defeat as an alternative path rather than an ending or just a point penalty. It would definitely help to get the next mission briefing before reorganizing, but I think it fits the premise of the unknown factor. You're trying to give your soldiers a fighting chance against anything that might happen. This is a desperate, scattered fight in Urbanmech territory, not a pre-planned operation.

But despite this sense of helplessness and its bleak setting, it’s genuinely low-intensity. Turns move quickly, missions are short, and faster players than me can finish a campaign in a few hours. Resource management is less complicated and more intuitive than it first appears, and while it’s painful to have your force halved in a single artillery strike, it feels fair, or as fair as such a game should be. Unpredictable reinforcements, variable missions, and sometimes sheer luck feel appropriate rather than punishing or a waste of time. The stakes for your people are clearly high, but as the player, they don’t require painful decisions, intense focus, or complex thinking. Khaligrad is a pugnacious little beast that punches above its weight, and while it’s a bit stiff, it’s a solid enough wargame that I can play between dunking my hair in the sink repeatedly.

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