Strain Tactics

Strain Tactics

Touch Dimensions Interactive · 2017 · Strategy, Action, Indie, Gore, Real Time Tactics

PC
Very Positive87% · 213
Best price 35 Fair price
$4.49-70%
$14.99lowest tracked $1.79
Steam Buy at Steam

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Steam
Steam
Standard Edition · Steam
-70%
$4.49
$14.99
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Gameseal
Gameseal
Standard Edition · Steam
$6.63
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About Strain Tactics

Strain Tactics is a real-time-with-pause tactical game, where you command a squad of soldiers to liberate earth from an alien infestation. Featuring 80 playable characters and over 150 unique items and weapons, the game challenges players to defeat enemies by commanding customizable ground teams from their Helibase overhead. Players can indulge in a variety of scenarios across over 30 different maps, and the sandbox-style mechanics allows users to approach the maps according to their play style.

Key Features
  • Build and command your own 1-5-member heliborne task force.
  • Choose from over 80 playable characters with unique personalities and traits, and equip their 1-3 inventory slots with countless weapon and item combinations.
  • Choreograph your team’s actions in real time with a fast and dynamic drag-control system, alongside traditional RTS-style controls.
  • Freedom to focus on simply positioning your squad and observe like a traditional RTS, or micromanage them like a top-down shooter!
  • Defend your Helibase, and protect your team from above with miniguns, autocannons, and more.
  • Manage your team’s mental health. Keep your squad topped up with happy pills, or deploy emotionless combat droids.
  • Protect your task force from contamination, or watch them erupt into even more strain.
  • Level up your units, and revive fallen team members by body-bagging (or selling their corpses for points).
  • Travel to over 30 unique maps with various scenarios including Hunter-Killer, Escort, Retrieval, Perimeter Defence, and more.

What Steam players say

Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.

✦ AI summary

Players praise the game as a solid tactical shooter with good content and no microtransactions, but control issues are a frequent complaint that significantly hampers enjoyment for some. Additionally, players report frustrating bugs like missions not registering as completed and difficulty understanding game mechanics without external resources or wikis, though the core gameplay loop of managing diverse unit types and equipment remains engaging.

Not recommended Jan 4, 2026
I want to play this more. I want to love it more, but the controls. You somehow made an RTS with tank controls. It's not as bad as Zomboid, but man. It's a good game but the controls hurt it for me
2 found this helpful
Not recommended Jun 29, 2026
If I had just one word to describe this game, it would be "clunky" Its not just because of the mobile-derived interface that has your mouse constantly ping-ponging between every edge of the screen just to achieve basic gameplay tasks. as many others have mentioned, rather, there is an overall feeling of discontinuity felt in several areas that makes the game feel cumbersome to play. Here are just some of the things that make the game feel just straight up unpolished and bad: Even within the first mission its clear that the game's sandbox is bloated with a number of redundant consumable items, there are at least a dozen whose only feature is healing a small amount (something which is already free in your helicopter that you can retreat to at any time), serving only to take up space. Lines of sight are utterly unclear. I honestly cant even tell if this game uses a fog of war system, room-based vision, or traditional vision cones as there is little visual distinction between visible and obscured terrain. There are zero tooltips for items on the ground, you have to pick them up to see what they are. A lot of basic information throughout the game is either completely with…
Recommended May 10, 2026
goated game
Not recommended Dec 31, 2025
I like the game as a whole, but it has not the biggest, but EXTREMELY annoying disadvantages, because of which I cannot recommend it. - the game has HUGE problems correctly registering a successfully completed mission, very often it turned out that the completed mission was not marked "completed" on the map after its completion. - the game also has problems marking the completion of goals on the mission itself, for example, in the "Neurocity" mission there is a goal to "keep the hostage alive" (which is not rewarded in any way, which is also a common problem in the game), which is not marked as "completed" even if the hostage survived after the Cyborg was eliminated. - there is no way to change the behavior of units when encountering infected neutral units, or infecting allied units. They immediately open fire on them, which often leads to mission failure. - separation of stores on the main base and stores on the mission, which is quite inconvenient. it seems to me that the best thing would be to make sure that after the successful completion of the mission, the contents of the stores and cryocapsules from this mission are added to the stores at the main base. - it would also be de…
Recommended Sep 21, 2025
Yuppers, F all for a wiki/solid info. Gotta learn stuff ya self/find SOMEONE that knows anything. Like other folks, Door kickers comes to mind. Story? it has it and Lore but like the wiki comment not much is out their, gotta learn it on ya own. Combat? Strain, Humanoids, and Robotic foes. Want a AC-130? you got that in a Heli-Base. People are people in this, they WILL panic/do things you don't tell them at times/often. IE ordering some one to run into death, they will attempt to but probably end up backing up while shooting. Robots follow orders to a T "mostly" issue? You can't revive a robot or gain skill, and some are harder to "heal" repair. Keep in mind this review was made YEARS and YEARS after I first played it, and only replayed it for a week or two upon this review. Thank you for ya time if you read this far.
Recommended Jun 28, 2025
Had this game on mobile for a bit and it was great. Immediately got it for Steam once I saw it as would be great to use a mouse and keyboard for it. It is a really fun tactical shooter with tons of things to equip and mess around with.

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