Swedish developers The Bearded Ladies certainly have a type. If you’ve played the memorably odd Mutant Year Zero or the largely forgettable Corruption 2029, you’ll know it by now – a blend of real-time stealth and turn-based tactics, where you quietly pick off stragglers from enemy squads before confronting the rest in a team scrap. Now here’s Miasma Chronicles, the Ladies’ third effort, and let’s just say they’re clearly happy to stick with what they know.
While the patterns of play are to a great extent the same, though, Miasma Chronicles is a more ambitious project. Addressing criticisms that those earlier games weren’t substantial enough, it’s a broader, denser beast, in which you could easily spend twice as long – 30 hours or so – seeing all the sights and shooting the nasties that populate them. That means there’s a lot more space available for this game to coax out varied strategies and introduce more elements, which is great. But it also means the weaker elements of the formula are left more exposed, which isn’t.