It’s hard to make a solid tactical strategy game. There are a few templates to choose from: Fire Emblem, Nectaris, Langrisser, Tactics Ogre, and X-Com. Most of the turn-based strategy out there follows one of those styles, and that hasn’t changed for a good twenty years. Why? Because it works and it’s very difficult to come up with a new formula. Redemption Reapers (review here) managed to find some innovative new ways to tweak the Fire Emblem formula recently and now Miasma Chronicles from developer The Bearded Ladies and publisher 505 Games is here to provide a new take on the X-Com formula. You might remember The Bearded Ladies from Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden (review here) and they’ve refined things a bit since then.
Miasma Chronicles is the story of Elvis. No, not that Elvis. Elvis is a kid living in post-apocalyptic Kentucky (accent and all). America has been overrun by miasma, a mysterious and almost sentient particle that swirls through the country, killing or mutating everything in its wake. The remnants of humanity are scraping by to subsist, scrounging the plastic leftovers of our disposable society for scraps and slowly dying out. Elvis’ mom was lost beyond a wall of Miasma but she left him a mechanical glove that can absorb miasma and a note to come find her. Sadly, he doesn’t entirely know how to use it.
Accompanying Elvis is Diggs, a robot who constantly cracks jokes and is meant to be funny, but whose clear African-American dialect comes off as questionable at best, especially as a support character. You’ll eventually pick up more playable characters along the way, including Jade and Mason, but it doesn’t matter who you have, you still can only field three characters at a time. Your entire goal? Save your mom from who knows what and maybe America along with her. But here’s where things get rocky for Miasma Chronicles.
Elvis…is not a likeable main character. Everything about him is irreverent, irritating, and off-putting. The script for Miasma Chronicles is patchy at best and often painful and it detracts from the game fairly significantly. Between the wise-cracking blacksploitation robot, the redneck-adjacent main character, and the weirdness of the supporting cast, it’s hard to really care whether or not you save Elvis’ mom. Other characters appear and they just die out left and right but there’s no emotional impact to it. Unlike Mutant Year Zero, the script is noticeably weak here and it makes a big difference. If you’re playing Miasma Chronicles for the story, be aware that it’s not a solid hook.
That being said, the tactical design of the game is excellent. A lot has changed since Mutant Year Zero and while it’s clear the engine is similar, there are some key upgrades and changes. As with most turn-based games of this type, you’ve got action points. You only get two and typically you’re going to be moving and shooting. Combat consists of your three moves followed by the enemy’s innumerable ones. You can attack, use an item, shoot, reload, or use a special ability (once you get them). That’s about it.
What’s interesting about the design is that the game tells you the percentage success rate of every attack once in range. Sniper rifles are ineffectual at close range while assault rifles are crap at a distance. You can switch weapons without using a movement point and reload silently. You also get a variety of grenades that vary in effectiveness. None of that will save you in and of itself though, especially on normal difficulty as Miasma Chronicles is gruelingly difficult. The Bearded Ladies sure know how to make a tough strategy game and this is no exception. Fortunately, there is an additional element here that vastly improves gameplay and your chances.
One of the key shifts in Miasma Chronicles from other X-Com style games is the addition of a robust real-time stealth element. You’re outnumbered, sure, but if you sneak around and pick off the enemies one by one maybe you can even the odds up. Before combat, you walk around in third person real-time and that includes in battlefields. You can sneak around the edges of the enemy’s vision (clearly delineated on the ground) and shoot them from behind, giving you a tactical advantage. Seems unfair, right? But when there’s 20 of them and 3 of you, things are bound to get a little challenging.
In Ambush mode, you drop into a turn based attack pattern and sneak up on an enemy. If you’re using Jade, she starts with a silenced sniper rifle, making things particularly easy. Simply get in range while crouched, sneak up behind an enemy, and fire. You can easily set your range to guarantee a 100% hit chance and take out the footmen before taking on the bulk of a more powerful force, evening the odds. It’s not foolproof however, and if you’re underpowered, you might just hit them and alert them. You can also break your teak into three parts, sending them to different areas to flank and snipe multiple targets at once. This strategy makes it seem like you are everywhere and keeps the enemies from grouping into more powerful units. Finally, Miasma Chronicles also has one of the best uses of glass bottle distractions ever in a strategy game.
Tossing a bottle out distracts the closest enemy and they come over to see what’s going on. When you’re readying a toss, the game clearly shows you where the enemy will go and whether or not they’ll see you, allowing you to adjust your placement to maximize your attack. Enemies use line-of-sight in Miasma Chronicles, so if you snipe one within visual range of another enemy, they’ll sound the alarm and everyone comes racing at you. Distract them by pulling them out of sight and you can slowly break the line, weakening defensive emplacements and allowing you to undermine the relative strength of an enemy group. Pretty cool, right? Once you’ve wiped out an enemy, you can exit Ambush mode and walk around again, setting yourself up for the next attack. It’s a good system overall.
Your characters have some good attacks as they get stronger too. Elvis’ glove can throw enemies, control their minds, and a host of other things. Throw some chips into it and it can add modifiers of various types to attacks too including gaining additional money or life. Diggs the robot has a dash attack that can run across the screen and gun down enemies in close combat or with a rifle, and he can act as a shield for other characters. Everyone has specific skills that grow with the addition of skill points. Adding skills such as overwatch (your character automatically shoots at any enemy that moves within range) is essential. Weapons can also be modified with scopes and weapon mods, making them more powerful in certain situations or with certain enemy types, and characters can even be boosted with additional items.
Unfortunately, it’s not all roses for the tactical portion of Miasma Chronicles either. There are a number of issues with the game that definitely take away from the overall experience. First off, the ambush mode. It’s wonderful to be able to thin the herd before a fight, but there are some pretty strong caveats. First off, if you sneak up on an enemy and attack them, even if they’re out of sight of the other enemies, they all hear you fire and are alerted to your presence, effectively limiting you to taking out a single soldier unless you use Jade who has a silenced sniper rifle. That limits you pretty severely and there’s no grab-from-behind Solid Snake move here. Eventually you’ll scrounge up more silenced weapons, making things much easier, but for a while at least, it’s definitely frustrating.
Second, there’s the menu functionality. Currently, the save and load menus of this install don’t actually show the icons. You have to figure out what menu you’re selecting by button presses, a pretty glaring bug that hasn’t been rectified as of the last patch. Additionally on this build of the XSX version of Miasma Chronicles, separating your characters to plan ambushes…doesn’t work. The game goes through a tutorial to teach you how to do it, but then when you go into battle and try to use it, it simply doesn’t happen. The game is still playable without it but it’s pretty irritating to lose a key tactical activity right after learning about it.
The difficulty is also extremely high. On Standard mode, you don’t regenerate health after a battle, leaving you scrounging to heal as there’s nowhere to rest and regain hit points in the game. You’ll need every Medipod you can find if you plan to survive and plastic is a lot more dear than it should be considering how unforgiving the game is. Drop the difficulty down to narrative however and things are another story. Now your health regenerates, enemy hit points are lower and they do less damage. This makes those nigh-unwinnable situations much more approachable and you can raise or lower difficulty at any time if you feel guilty (you shouldn’t). Load times are also surprisingly long on the XSX, making it feel like the game isn’t properly optimized.
Miasma Chronicles ends up feeling like something of a mixed bag once you get the feeling for it. On one hand, the visuals and world-building are excellent and the overall vibe of the game and gameplay design is great. On the other, the story leaves a lot to be desired and the minutia of the interface is mired in technical issues and counter-intuitive interfaces that make game play less satisfying than it should be. The game feels like a well-polished beta and definitely needs some tweaking still, but the core experience is great and the strategic value is quite high, something of a rarity these days. Hardcore strategy enthusiasts are going to love this one, regardless of the plot. If you’re on the fence though, it might be time to wait for a discount, a sale, or the inevitable patches that are headed for Miasma Chronicles in the next few months. It isn’t Mutant Year Zero by any means, but Miasma Chronicles still manages to stand on its own, albeit shakily. It’s definitely a title to watch and it has the potential to improve in the near future as well, so don’t give up on it!
This review is based on a digital copy of Miasma Chronicles provided by the publisher. It was played on an Xbox Series X using a 55” Sony 1080p TV. Miasma Chronicles is also available for PS5 and PC on Steam and Epic Games.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.
