This game is pretty awesome. Been playing it with my brother the last couple of days and it really takes some strategy and pre-planning.
Frozen Synapse is very hard to put in a genre. At first, if you watch the trailers, you’ll assume it’s some kind of squad-based top-down shooter. In fact, it’s anything but. It’s a tactical turn-based strategy game that is comparable to chess. You start out with some number of units, usually 3 or 4, and you can give them orders on what to do the next turn. Each turn is 5 seconds; this is a fairly arbitrary time, because it all really depends on how fast your units/grenades/rockets move. Games are on average 30 seconds in game-time, but they can take 20 minutes to play out. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but imagine watching a chess game live, with the players thinking about their next move after every turn, versus simply watching all the moves after the fact without any player deliberation.
The grenadier in the top left being shot at ends up surviving, because of his position behind cover
The game is all about positioning and foresight. If you predict that a grenade might be coming at you the next turn, you might duck behind cover. However, this might lose you an opportunity to gun down the incoming shotgun soldier. Or maybe not, because the shotgun soldier instead took cover as well, anticipating that you would not take cover. You might position all your units to defend a certain room, only to see that your opponent has predicted this and shot a rocket at the room (which blasts down walls). The possibilities for gameplay are endless. To win in Frozen Synapse, you must predict well and sometimes take some risks. For example, shotgun soldiers shoot much faster than any other type; however, their capabilities are limited by their range. Often, you can take down enemies by simply rushing your shotgunners into them, but it’s risky because you never know what the enemy is going to do. Your target could simply back up and another of your enemy’s soldiers could come in and shoot your shotgunnner from behind.
Frozen Synapse does have a slight element of chance; either one of two machine gunners firing at each other down a long hallway could get shot before the other does. However, this element of chance is largely removed by the ability to run simulations. Not only can you control your soldiers, you can control the enemy soldiers in simulations to attempt to predict how the enemy will move and react accordingly. When you don’t know if your shotgunner will be able to take down the enemy machine gunner before that sniper over there gets his shot off, you can test it out and see what happens. This, I think, is the greatest feature of the game because it could have been a game of chance - and thus, frustration - without it. It doesn’t make the game imbalanced, either, because the enemy won’t always do what you predicted in the simulation; he could have second-guessed you, predicting what you predicted would happen, and taking a different, superior route. Again, it’s all about positioning and foresight.
An interesting option on each of the game modes (There are five of them, but I’ve only played extermination, in which the goal is to eliminate all of the enemy’s units) is the option to turn the arena “dark.” When you set this flag, you cannot see where the enemy units are unless you have a clear line of sight. It introduces a new element into the mix, but I prefer the “light” option, because with “dark” on, you cannot run simulations with enemy units, thus introducing that element of chance.
I have only a two gripes with the game. The first is that when I bought it on Steam, the servers were very, very slow. It would take minutes to log in. It’s fixed now, but there was a tradeoff; they have split the multiplayer game into many servers. You can only challenge people that are on the server you are currently on, and the servers only have about 50 people on them at a given time. However, it’s the lesser of two evils.
The other gripe is one of balance. The game randomly generates levels and, often, randomly places units. Many times, this results in unbalanced positioning; a shotgunner may be placed right outside a room which contains an enemy grenadier, ensuring the grenadier’s instant death. Other times, one player’s units may be spawned in a room with only one exit, and all it takes is a single rocket from the opposing player to kill 2 or 3 out of the 4 total soldiers. There is a “symmetric” option when generating maps; however, I find this makes games somewhat static. There isn’t really an easy way to fix this. One suggestion I do have to remedy this flaw is to allow soldiers to jump over cover, thus eliminating some chokepoints. Of course, this maneuver would probably take one or two seconds (a long time in game-time) to execute.
tl;dr, Frozen Synapse is a terrific game that you should definitely try. For the price of $20 for two copies of the game, it’s worth it. It has great visuals and gameplay different from any current genres. It won’t appeal to everyone, but it’s definitely worth a shot.
Here’s a video of a game I played with my brother, after the fact (no deliberation between turns)
I’ll post one of me playing a match live, later.