The first game I'm going to talk about is Frozen Synapse. It's a tactical turn-based indie game and a pretty good one at that. The interesting thing about it is that there are no dice-rolls or hitpoints. You send your soldiers against enemy soldiers in randomly generated maps and depending on their placements and cover they will either succeed or die.
How it works is this - during your turn you set waypoints to your troops (machinegunners, grenade launcers, etc.) and when you are satisfied with the plan, you prime it and see how it works out against your enemy's plan. Until then you can "simulate" the outcome but what your opponent decides (you can play against AI or other player) always remains a mystery. Usually the enemy's plans are not what you predicted and you might find yourself winning or losing very unexpectedly. No type of soldier is "better" than the other so the aim is to find the situation in which they are able to outgun the enemy, such as shotguns at close range and rockets against clusters of enemies in a chokepoint.
The game is unforgiving and I find it quite addicting. However, the whole neo-dystopian spiritual-electronical setting gets old pretty fast. I mean, we have a great tactical gunplay game here - why not try to fit it into some other kind of military kind of universe. Okay, we're all sick to death of Call of Duties and Battlefields and nobody wants to make a game that everybody sees as a top down Modern Warfare clone but bluish cyber mumbo-jumbo is still a pretty odd design choice. Also, the music (reminiscent of Mirror's Edge) doesn't really fit and while playing the game my flatmate actually came to ask if I was watching porn...
Should you be interested, you can find the game on Steam pretty cheap...
Saiko
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