Frontier: Path of Shadows strips the dice roll out of tactics, which is all anybody ever asked for

Everybody has a story about missing a 95 per cent shot in XCOM, and everybody has been telling the same anecdote for fifteen years.

Oduvan Games decided to turn it into a selling point: they took what they liked from XCOM and Final Fantasy, and removed the coin flip.

What that changes

When chance disappears from a tactical game, the nature of the decision changes entirely.

You no longer bet, you calculate. A move is no longer a stake, it is a position. A mistake is no longer bad luck, it is a mistake, and you know which one.

That is harder than it sounds, because you can no longer hide behind probability. And it is infinitely more satisfying when it works, because the victory belongs entirely to you.

The game adds a layer that prevents memorisation: maps are procedurally generated and adapt to your past decisions. So you cannot learn a level by heart, only learn to read a situation.

The crew, which is half the game

The tone is that of a space serial, and it works.

You are Jay, a former courier whose life turned over when a sentient crystal, hunted across half the galaxy, moved into his head. Around him is the corvette Simurgh, battered but crewed by capable people. Rob flies and avoids permanent landings. Alice lives in the engine room and can crack a system when needed. Khan knows more than the rest combined and nobody asks why.

The Frontier is the barely charted outskirts of known space, where everything comes down to chance: rich today, rotting in a pirate hold tomorrow. Most come chasing glory. Your crew is mostly trying to survive.

It is written with a genuine voice, and it gives the missions a reason to exist beyond the tactical grid.

The loop

Between fights you explore. You travel to worlds nobody has set foot on, gather resources, earn credits, unlock new opportunities.

You upgrade your squad, find better gear, and above all keep it in working order. The game presses that point: equipment failure in the middle of a fight is the last thing you want. High-end tech is rare out here, but a skilled merc always finds a way.

And there are choices. Jay wants to survive, Johnson wants to be remembered, and nobody knows what the symbiont wants. You decide on your allies and your enemies.

What it is worth

The game launched the day before yesterday at 13.16 euros, and shows 38 reviews, all positive. That is too few to build a score on alone, but a clean sheet across thirty-eight responses is a signal.

It is single-player only, with no Steam achievements, which betrays a small team focused on essentials.

My reservation belongs to the no-randomness risk: without dice, a tactical game has to compensate with situational variety, or it becomes a puzzle you solve the same way each time. Procedural generation and adaptation to past decisions are precisely there for that, and it is what needs watching across twenty hours.

Did you side with Jay or with Johnson? Betrayals are recounted on the InsertCoins Discord.