Manor Lords publisher’s time loop tactics RPG Every Day We Fight is out today in early access

It’s the open environments of tactical RPG Every Day We Fight that have most caught my eye. Huge warehouses, bases, and ruins so stuffed with cover and walkways as to suggest the dominant species on the game’s pre-alien invasion earth were sandbag piles. These sprawling layouts aren’t just for show or getting a nice height advantage, either. The city is explorable between battles with your gang of resistance members, letting you poke around and scavenge before sneaking into optimal positions for the next scrap against invading aliens.

My own personal reaction to realising I’m trapped in a time loop would be the Bill Murray approach, i.e inserting large slices of cake into my mouth, to the audible disgust of Andie MacDowell. Here, you’ll be using it to your advantage by learning the location of useful discoveries for subsequent runs. These roguelite bits also make themselves known through a sort of push-your-luck heat meter, where subsequent fights get tougher and enemies more numerous, but also offer better rewards.

The executive producer on the game is YouTube tactics man ChristopherOdd, who I credit for making me markedly less rubbish at XCOM many years ago by offering the simple but transformative advice to prioritise finishing off aliens over everything else – the thinking being that one stray shot from one lowly sectoid can feasibly still kill your best guy. Good advice! Here’s him narrating the game’s feature overview trailer. I should also point out how much I appreciate this kind of calm, epic strings-free explanation of what a game actually is. Good trailer!

The arrival of the Rifters brought the world to a standstill, but life goes on for your fighters. Uncover their checkered pasts as they learn to work together. Unveil the mystery of the alien invaders and their control over time as you fight through the streets of a once-beautiful city to reveal the full truth about the war. Your resistance grows stronger with each success, and with each failure – after all, death is only the beginning.

Every Day We Fight should be on Steam in early access by the time you read this, unless you’ve somehow snuck in the RPS content management system, in which case: get out! The lingering scent of bumeggs and Peter Molyneux squirming is ours to enjoy alone.