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Given its antic plundering of creaky old books, it should not be surprising that Code Name: STEAM finds its soul in a library. And not just any library. This is the great library at Miskatonic University, the starting point for so many excursions into the weird, the deathless, the unthinkable. More on that stuff in a bit. What's important is that the library is a wonderfully unusual map, and one that brings out the best in a wonderfully unusual - and often infuriating - game. Code Name: STEAM is a squad-based tactics affair (more Valkyria Chronicles than XCOM due to the granularity of its action points variant) and the library level starts by encouraging you to split your team of four into two teams of two. You're on the back foot from the end of the first turn.The mission here seems pretty simple: simultaneously activate two switches at opposite ends of the map, and then beat it downstairs to the huge metal gate that the switches have opened for you - a gate that houses your goal and a couple of real beasts called Berzerkers who are standing in front of it. As is often the case with this sort of game, things got good for me only when things got bad. One of my teams ran into serious trouble - sniper and grenade aliens waiting just beyond the first of the switches, taking out Henry Fleming, of the Red Badge of Courage, and all but crippling the Scarecrow (who only wanted a brain). The gate was open, the last save point was used up and these guys were a mess - so getting to the goal depended on the other team.
There were dozens of ways that things could play out. I should know: I tried most of them. Code Name: STEAM is a weird, rather ornery game, with its claustrophobic levels, its endless enemy reinforcements, and the fact that, in a direct contradiction to the approaches of most strategy titles, you're not given any kind of overhead view of the terrain. Other strategy games might ration ammo or special moves: in Code Name: STEAM, information is the most valuable resource, and it's also the hardest to come by. Some people find this insanely annoying as they hunt, endlessly, for a map screen that simply isn't there, or wait out enemy turns staring at the back of a pillar. I genuinely understand their pain. But in the library, that lack of intel came together with tight spaces, tricksy vertical pathways and a range of strongly-defined characters to create the very thing that all strategy games aspire to being: a laboratory of tactics, a place where you muddle about with your inputs until you achieve the output you're after - or something even better.
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