Defilade is the RTS where your soldiers actually use cover
A solo-developed, old-school isometric RTS where troops take real cover, drag the wounded to safety and fight over supply lines you can cut. It just cleared 100K wishlists on Steam.
A solo-developed, old-school isometric RTS where troops take real cover, drag the wounded to safety and fight over supply lines you can cut. It just cleared 100K wishlists on Steam.
Every RTS since Red Alert has had the same dirty secret: your soldiers don’t really use cover. They stand near a wall, the game counts it, and everyone pretends. Defilade is a solo-developed, old-school isometric RTS built around fixing exactly that, and it has just cleared 100,000 wishlists on Steam.
Any wall, crate, car, wreck, trench or window works as cover, because troops check the actual shapes around them. Behind a low wall they crouch and pop up to fire. If the wall is too tall, they move to the corner and lean out instead. Near misses pin them down, close explosions make them flinch, and ammo runs out, so a position running dry drops to single shots before it goes quiet. They’ll even grab ammo off bodies on the way past.
Throw a grenade and sometimes it comes straight back. Explosions send soldiers flying, and some get back up dazed. They vault walls and fight hand to hand up close.
This is the bit that sold us. A badly hit soldier goes down calling for a medic and starts bleeding out, crawling to cover if he can. His squad lays down covering fire while someone drags him back by the shoulders, and the wounded guy keeps popping off with his pistol the whole way. Build a medic tent and stretcher teams run out to bring your soldiers home. Each time a soldier goes down he comes back a bit weaker, so you can’t lean on it forever.
Soldiers can also surrender (rarely), and prisoners give up live intel on the enemy base when they’re interrogated.
Buildings don’t pop out of the ground. Your units walk over and build them by hand, mid-fight if they have to. The FOB (forward operating base) is everything: troops fight from it, rearm at it, it raises your unit cap, and if you lose your last one it’s game over. Every FOB lays a road back to your lines, and supply trucks drive it. Ambush the trucks or cut the road and every FOB past that point starves. Add trenches, wire, mines, MG nests and tank traps, all of it destructible, plus tanks, helicopters and FPV kamikaze drones that your troops can hear coming.
Co-op and PvP multiplayer is already working (online and LAN). The big goal is a grand single-player campaign on one huge fictional map: two superpowers fighting a proxy war, with soldiers who level up between missions and die for good. There’s no release date yet (“Coming soon” on Steam), and it’s planned for Windows and Mac.
Red Alert 1 and Sudden Strike 2 DNA, with squad AI that looks smarter than most big-budget RTS games manage. It’s one developer, so we’ll be watching how the campaign comes together. But this is one to wishlist now. If you’re keen, drop into the Discord and tell us what you’d want to see in a squad night when it lands.
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