Black Powder Red Earth®

The best way to describe Black Powder Red Earth is "Modern Warfare meets Sekiro, interpreted as a turn-based game."

It looks like XCOM, it plays superficially like XCOM, but it's a very different game to XCOM. It's an attempt to capture the feel of city fighting, of special forces raids, through the canvas of a turn-based game, and for the most part, in my opinion, it delivers on that.

Let there be no mistake: this game has a legitimate difficulty curve, one that happens because it's a genuinely challenging game, and because the paradigms and philosophies behind BPRE are counterintuitive to many conventional turn-based games. In XCOM, Overwatch creeping is the meta - a slow crawl across the map, relying on overwatch to counterattack the enemy. Missions end once all hostiles are killed. In BPRE, you're on the clock, and the longer you take, the more enemies start showing up - and that's before you run into that ten turn time limit. This is part of the attempt to capture the feel of how an actual raid would go down, when you're on the clock with a very finite time limit.

It's a game that I play and rage at. A lot of the typical crutches and safety nets aren't present here. But that feeling when you finally get the ideas behind the game, when it all comes together -

- it's in that moment that you really feel like you're a special forces commander who's leading a team of operators.

You just got to get used to dying a lot on the way. :V

It's not a game for everyone. But give it a try, approach it with an open mind and be willing to do things differently, and this game might surprise you.

Krieg Ju-on!

Please for the love of god, let us skip the enemy movement phase! Especially on high vis ops if there are more than 12 tangos on the map it takes AGES for every single one to move... give us the option to speed this up

Hooh boy, these are some awful analogies.
"The best way to describe Black Powder Red Earth is 'Modern Warfare meets Sekiro, interpreted as a turn-based game.'"
"It's modern Chess, with some randomizing cards thrown in."

How about: "Arma Tactics 2". Or "I'll just play Doorkickers 2 and wait until there's a flannel/plainclothes uniform mod instead".

Anyways, this is pretty un-fun to play. Consistent annoyances include:

Slow walking cycle.
The lack of ability to move multiple units at the same time, so you don't have to wait and make a game that simulates being a high speed operator painfully slow.
The inability to have Overwatch until you find the local Jihadi HQ. Even then, it's a one-turn use with no ability to tell if you've already used up a reaction or not.
Inability to use WASD or Arrow Keys to pan around the map.
Inability to customize the outfits of your Ember kill team members.
Difficulty in being able to discern the LOS of both Shadow Emirate jihadists, civilians, or your operators.