Taking matters into your own hands happens one turn at a time in Vigilantes, an upcoming tactical RPG now on Kickstarter. With more than a passing resemblance to modern XCOM titles, Vigilantes frames its gritty film noir story with turn-based combat encounters and party building. Characters come with a variety of stats and skills that can be tweaked as they progress.
Along the with basics of melee and ranged combat, other skills allow players to succeed in dialogue situations, or to locate additional loot after combat, and so on.
You can grab the playable right now. It features some preset missions to try out, picked from the overall story of the full game. The final version will be more open-ended.
Ambushed
Among my adventures with this early version was a situation involving an enemy ambush. They outnumbered my machete-wielding main character, but thankfully I had some armed backup. While my character waited patiently around a corner to shank the oncoming attackers, I sent the second character to flank and efficiently hose down the exposed enemies as they closed in on my decoy.
Or at least that’s how it would have gone down if my backup didn’t aim like she were caught in a earthquake. She failed almost all of her attempts at shooting despite the decent odds of a hit. I did mention the resemblance to XCOM, right?
Setting a modest €5,000 ($5,600) goal, Irish developers Timeslip Softworks aren’t looking to build from the ground up. They call the current state of Vigilantes “effectively complete”, and are searching for additional funding to polish up and head towards full release.
If all goes well, players can expect a May 2017 release. Given they’ve already reached nearly 40% of their goal and have over a month left, the odds on this one look good.
