Every Day We Fight Early Access review: XCOM with the thrill of being the last man standing on your CS team

In turn-based tactics games, there are two enemies: the enemies and yourself. While impulsive, stupid decisions are hard to get rid of entirely, enemies can be studied and adapted to, just like battlegrounds on your own characters’ abilities. Experienced as I might be in turn-based tactics games, Every Day We Fight gave me a lot of studying to do — usually powered by my Thorns dying yet another horrible death at the hands of the Rifters, mysterious alien invaders.

I’m trying to build teleporters, you see, and for that I need alien tech from three locations in this ruined city, each of them heavily fortified by Rifters. Clearing the hotel and the bus depot wasn’t the greatest problem, though I failed the bonus objective on the second occasion, allowing the aliens to deny me access to one of their weapon stashes. This final area is a bit tricky, though. 

The bonus objective wants me to destroy a harvester, which requires me to blow up its three power cores by shooting them at just the right moment, in the split second when their shields rotate away. In the meantime, aliens come at me from all sides and reinforcements spawn all over the place. I had basically already done it, but that’s when enemy number two showed up — myself.

Dylan, the group’s muscle, can make an out-of-turn reaction when enemies get too close and punch them so hard that they get knocked on their butts for two turns. It’s so powerful that it’s borderline abusive, but Every Day We Fight throws so many enemies at you that playing dirty is mandatory. So, Dylan was doing great, punching everyone climbing up to his position, but in a moment of monkey brain I used his overwatch ability instead, which meant that he couldn’t do the reactive punch and opened him up to being overwhelmed.

With Dylan gone, Vivian and Leo in another building were able to finish off the harvester, but couldn’t contend with the sheer mass of enemies flooding over them. Another death, another failure.

But death is a feature in Every Day We Fight. The protagonists and the aliens are caught in a time loop, so you get to attempt your missions again and again until you kill the current act’s boss and advance the timeline a bit. This time loop expresses itself in the form of some roguelite mechanics: By killing powerful enemies and discovering stronger gear, you gain the ability to find these items in your next attempt. This also introduces variety. Sometimes, you’ll start with three shotguns instead of a balanced arsenal.

That’s the cool thing about Every Day We Fight: You can study enemies and terrain and master abilities, giving you all the strategic satisfaction of a regular turn-based tactics game, but there’s a major element of improvisation and playing with the cards you’re dealt.

Your characters retain all of their XP and abilities throughout the game. Dylan, as mentioned, is the group’s muscle. He’s great in close-up engagements and can hide himself in smoke, blinding foes. Vivian is the scientist: She can use alien shields and place a hologram of herself to divert enemy fire, but also take a reaction to finish enemies off out-of-turn. Leo is a bit of a support: He can donate action points, heal, and provide covering fire. All three are fully voiced and have backstories you’ll learn of throughout the campaign. Their dialog during exploration delivers lots of interesting worldbuilding.

Since you’re limited to these characters, you must play into their strengths and learn when and where their abilities are best used. But again, you’re going to be forced to improvise and adapt from run to run, as the game throws random equipment at you.

The other special element of this game is that all the shooting you do – during your turn, during your overwatch, or whenever else – is done in real time and from a first-person perspective. It’s a bit like Phoenix Point in this regard. There are no shenanigans with shots missing despite having a 99% hit chance. If a shot misses, it’s because you screwed it up yourself. With your own characters and enemies getting the aforementioned out-of-turn reactions, which allow them, among other things, to try and dodge incoming shots by running to a different piece of cover, Every Day We Fight’s combat feels incredibly dynamic. It's especially satisfying to destroy an enemy's helmet with a shotgun salvo, only to then target this newly made weakness with a sniper rifle.

It also adds the thrill of an entirely different genre into the mix. When you only have one of the three Thorns left, their HP low, enemies closing in, it basically feels like you’re the last person standing from your Counter-Strike team. I suppose it doesn’t really matter whether you clench your buttcheeks while you’re aiming down a rifle by yourself or praying to RNGesus for a hit.

The gunplay itself is not fantastic, but it does its job: There are clear differences between the gun types, and they’re predictable enough to learn (while being unpredictable enough to mimic those 99% misses). Attributes like accuracy and recoil can be adjusted with parts you find.

In between all the fighting (and dying), you can explore the map, using various gadgets unlocked through the story to gain access to loot. There is a fast travel system you can use to get around quickly and avoid attrition from repeated combat. Generating heat from fighting aliens leads to subsequent battles having stronger enemies, but also upgrades the loot being found, so there’s some risk-reward calculations to be made here.

While I’ve found it very rewarding to scout around potential battlegrounds for the best possible place of engagement, the exploration hasn’t been as satisfying. Most of the stuff you find is the humble scrap you can use to craft stuff at home or in the safehouses around town. Strong loot drops from enemies or is found in the chests you can open with keys that you get when you do main missions and bonus objectives. I’d love to find some more useful stuff around town as I explore. Generally, I think that item variety is an area in which the game can improve a lot. More weapon types, more equipment, more exotic mods for guns — there is a lot of potential here.

The AI in Every Day We Fight is relatively competent, though not without its embarrassing moments, which is only fair, given we humans don’t play perfectly either. It will generally attempt to make use of its numerical superiority by establishing crossfire positions, enclosing you in a net of overwatches. It’s a simple strategy, but it will effectively pressure you.

It’s a tough game and it can feel a little hopeless sometimes, though there hasn’t been a death so far that left me in utter despair — there’s always room for improvement. That said, sometimes it feels a little too punishing. Enemy melee troops are incredibly hard-hitting and the amount of reinforcements the foe gets in every battle is on the verge of being too much. When that final wave of enemies gets you in the third of three missions in a story chapter and you know that you’ll have to do it all over again from the start, that’s a tough one.

Every Day We Fight is an interesting, refreshing take on turn-based tactics games — one that will shine all the more once Early Access has worked out balancing issues and added content for greater variety. The fundamental mechanics and ideas are already in a great place.