Warhounds Review | How to Channel XCOM Through Gameplay

It is an impossible task to release a turn-based tactical game in this modern era without immediately being forcefully compared to the masterpiece made by Firaxis, XCOM. 

Luckily Warhounds leans into this and tries to reinvent the wheel a little. Opening the game and seeing the familiar grid-based layouts feels like a warm welcome to anyone who ever played any XCOM title.

This game is totally built on the golden rules of modern tactics, with full cover being a necessity, half cover meaning you are gambling with your life, and overwatch traps being your best friend. It also delivers amazing level design, especially with the verticality of it all. Best of all, the physics-based combat rewards aggressive play like no other, with the help of removing the genre’s most frustrating quirk: missing those close up shots.

Instead of relying on dice rolls or arbitrary percentages, it uses a physics based ballistics system. I’ve run up to enemies multiple times with shotguns at hand, and been rewarded with guaranteed kills every time. If you maneuver correctly, you are guaranteed not to miss. 

It all helps to make close-quarters combat not feel goofy, and flanking maneuvers to actually become reliable, creating a deeper “puzzle-like” gameplay loop.

The Overused Management Layer Between Missions

Unfortunately, the tactical highs of the gameplay loop get cut with the base and soldier management part, where you end up staring at menus constantly, let it be researching weapons, building base modules or tending to tired/injured soldiers. 

Now, that usually is engaging whenever you play at high difficulties, as your soldiers’ conditions are entirely your doing, but sadly the game uses a system based on artificial waiting periods and forced downtime that completely kills the pacing.

Instead of rewarding a flawless mission, the game halts your progress by relying on “recon missions”. Even if in theory scouting sounds cool, here they aren’t actual playable missions, they are just arbitrary timers. You are forced to assign your operators to a menu and simply wait for a clock to tick down before you can actually play the game again. 

This pacing issue is hit even harder by a fatigue and injury system that feels weirdly exaggerated. The recovery times for wounded or even just slightly tired soldiers are absurdly long. Because your best squadmates are constantly benched for weeks of in-game time, or tied up doing invisible recon duty just to unlock the next map, you are frequently forced to use under leveled B-teams.

It stops feeling like an engaging strategic game and starts feeling like tedious management, where your soldiers handle like toys instead of meaningful characters.

The Elephant in the Room: Generative AI

I investigated a bit before starting the game, and saw how the developers made a very public point to address the community’s concerns. They stated they had listened to the backlash and promised to scrub the controversial AI-generated character portraits and assets from the 1.0 release, which was a nice surprise as I didn’t know how the game originally looked in its earlier versions.

But playing the actual release tells a very different story. The prominent character portraits might have been swapped out, but the ghosts of generative AI are still very much haunting the game’s aesthetics in every mission.

If you stop and actually look at the environments between those firefights, you’ll find the remnants they missed. You will regularly run into bizarre, artifact-heavy ads plastered on brick walls, posters on city benches with nonsensical alien text, and environmental dressing that unmistakably carries that muddy and hallucinatory genAI signature we all hate.

While I can sympathize with the brutal financial realities and tight budgets of indie development, the amount of genAI stuff I found is just ridiculous, and leaving all that slop on the walls after promoting the use of models and art is definitely a bad move that made me feel lied to. It doesn’t even look good, which makes me think all these textures were made a long time ago, when AI wasn’t actually that competent. It all makes it feel even cheaper.

Is It Worth Playing?

Ultimately, Warhounds is a very complicated package. If you are a die-hard tactics fan desperate for a new sandbox to test your experience, the gameplay is sturdy enough to carry the experience on its back. The combat is undeniably fun and engaging, there’s no two ways about it.

Tight mechanics and clever coding can build a functional game, but it takes cohesive human artistry to build a memorable one. The story has a nice setting, and even if the main starting cast has some decent lines here and there, the plot is whatever, and the graphics do leave a bit to be desired.

For the price and genAI use, I’d say stay clear for now, unless you are truly and deeply itching for that sweet grid-based combat, and you don’t feel like replaying the classics.