Frozen Synapse

Finally got around to playing some Frozen Synapse, which I picked up from the Humble Bundle a few weeks ago. It feels a little intimidating at first, but once I played a couple of single player missions I started to get the mechanics down, which is when it became really enjoyable. It's a top down, turn based game in which you control a squad of soldiers. During your turn, you issue them orders, set waypoints, establish directions of fire, and so on. It's not unlike the original Rainbow Six games for the PC, where you plot out tactical movements on a map before the action starts, except in Synapse you can't actually manually control any of your agents. When you're done plotting out your movements, you finalize them by clicking a button and then all hell breaks loose. Enemy units and your units undertake their orders at the same time in each turn (which in real-time lasts about 30 seconds), so its easy for your well laid plans to go to hell quickly. Your shotgun man might turn a corner and take a bullet to the head because you didn't programmed him to aim in the wrong direction.

There seems to be a pretty robust multi-player component as well; there are a whole bunch of different gametypes. In the hour or so that I played today, I was challenged to two matches by two different people, and since the game is turn based, players don't have to be logged in at the same time. You can just set your moves, and return later to see the results.

It's a pretty fun game, and well worth the cost (you can get it for less than $5 with the HumbleBundle), especially if you have some friends you can play with. One feature that I really enjoy is the ability to record your missions and upload them to YouTube. In honor of this clever feature, here's a video of me getting most of my team (shown here in Green) slaughtered, and then pulling out a victory (against the computer, mind you) in the end.