Laser Squad (ZX Spectrum / Commodore 64, 1988)

From Julian Gollop, the author of Chaos, came this masterpiece, in 1988: Laser Squad. Quite probably, the best and most popular turn-based tactical game in the 80s.

What made LS so popular, even with action game fans? Among other things, it was polished, easy to learn, and had arcade-style graphics, instead of the common symbolic representations in strategy games. In other words, the player was able to see things as if he was actually there (only, of course, looking from above). This may seem normal these days (e.g. Jagged Alliance, Pathway to Glory, Gollop’s own later X-Com), but Laser Squad was the first game which showed everything so well. And all was controllable with a mere one-button joystick, or with 5 keys (4 directions plus fire). The graphics were good and realistic, and the explosions were a pleasure to watch – especially if it was an enemy caught in them.

To this day, I know people who only like action games and have never, ever played a turn-based strategy game… except this one.

Playing against the computer was great, but the best part of the game was playing it against a friend (hot-seat only – it was the 80s, remember). Games could be quick, or take up entire nights. And strategies that worked perfectly against the AI would fail miserably against a clever human – forcing one to adapt, to predict what the other was doing. Again, this is normal for this kind of games this days, but at the time there was nothing like it.

Oddly, to this day I still prefer the 1st scenario in the original game, called “The Assassins”. In it, one player controlled a squad of 5 troopers, who had to assassinate a weapons merchant in his private home – protected by several security droids. There were so many ways to do it – I loved demolishing part of the house with rocket launchers, although that meant sacrificing other weapons, armor and so on – if the rocket launchers didn’t do the trick, you’d find yourself completely outgunned. Of course, you could do it in the “proper” way, by sneaking into the house – which had several different accesses. Playing as the defenders was great too – a normal tactic was to hide the guy somewhere (such as in the bathroom!) and use the droids to mount a defence, or possibly to “lead” the attackers far away from their main target.

Another brilliant scenario came only in the first expansion pack, but was already included in the C64 port. In it, you had to defend a base from attacking robots – most of which were relatively weak, but one of them was a large battle droid which was so heavily armored that it was invulnerable from the front – even to rockets and grenades! The only way to destroy it was to attack from another angle (*)- which, if the other player was any good, was anything but easy. I still remember that the first half a dozen times or so I played that scenario, even against the computer on the easiest level, I was completely demolished…

… until I found a way. Which is still one of the things I like the most about computer and video games: the pleasure thay comes from finding a way, from solving a problem. But I digress.

(*) OK, that wasn’t the only way. But I don’t want to spoil it here.