Every so often a developer comes along and surprises you with an excellently designed concept for a game. Mode7 Games (website) has certainly done that with Frozen Synapse, which is a wonderful blend of real time and turn based strategy in a tactical “shooter.” I highly encourage anyone who enjoys strategy games to take a look. Even in its current beta stage the game is quite polished and certainly a lot of fun to play (video of the first match I played after playing through the tutorial match is embedded below via YouTube, which I should add is a feature built into the game!).

I’ll follow this up with a more in-depth review after I’ve spent some time playing the game, and especially after I jump into a few multiplayer matches. It should be worth noting, though, if you’re interested in the game and pre-order you get one additional license to share with a friend for free. If it appeals to you now would definitely be the time to jump on in!

Note, the video upload did have a bug wherein it only shows one of my three characters starting out. I’ll try to recreate the issue for the developers, but I think it still gives an idea of gameplay, and could have simply been the result of me mis-clicking on one of the units while the video was being recorded for upload.

Update: I’ll also create a video for my larger review that actually shows how the game is played instead of just showing the final result playback.