this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Hammer & Sickle, a rather interesting Russian turn-based squad tactics game. It's sort of a sequel to Silent Storm, and that one seems to be decently well-known, at least among fans of the genre, but H&S is a lot more obscure.
There's some caveats, namely that the difficulty can get kind of bullshit at times, and the quest design is pretty harsh (with a lot of missions having hidden time limits), but it gets a lot of bonus points in my book for having you play as a communist agent fighting a neo-fascist conspiracy in West Germany, and actually bringing up stuff like Western countries recruiting Nazis for their intelligence services. And the gameplay's still pretty solid even with the difficulty balancing issues, although the good parts are mostly inherited from Silent Storm.
I also find it really interesting from a game-design perspective, in that it's a relatively short game (by the standards of the genre at least, it's still a lot more than, say, a CoD campaign, especially if you spend a bunch of time running around with no idea what you're supposed to do) but with a ton of reactivity and alternative paths. Yes, there's hidden failure conditions all over the place, but the game doesn't actually just end - each one of those is its whole alternate plot branch.
A Russian youtuber made a video about it that I remember finding interesting but I forget if he recommends it.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: