No Plan B’s steam tags are Top-Down Shooter, Real Time Tactics and Military. The only tag there I agree with is Military. Top-Down Shooter lets you control the character, aim and fire but No Plan B does not let you do that, Real Time Tactics implies you can change up your tactics on the fly in Real Time, yet that is not what you get in No Plan B which is more like Doorkickers or even the old isometric view SWAT games.
No Plan B is more like a puzzle game where you choose a faction: SWAT, FBI, ROBBERS and GANGSTERS. Each faction has different bonuses for example 50% to health or -25% reaction time. Once in the game you choose the loadout of each team member with everything from handguns and rifles to flashbangs, grenades and extra ammo, and finally skills. After choosing the loadout you have to choose where to position that team member and depending on the map you can put them by windows or doors and when all team members are equipped and positioned, you have to start planning the breach and that is where No Plan B is different from the closest game Doorkickers, while Doorkickers is more real time where you can change the plan while it is being executed, No Plan B gives you a timeline where you can rewind and play your plan back and forth before starting the mission. During this planning stage you choose a team member and start plotting his movements, be it moving, breaching, throwing a flashbang/grenade and which direction he should face. When you’ve planned this member, you do the next until all members have their orders, then you can press play to see how they will move and if something is off you can adjust the timeline and the orders for each team member until you’ve gotten them all performing in tandem, though during this stage you’ll not get any information about where the hostiles are and have to try and predict their positions and how many they are.
Once you are ready the mission can start and you’ll see it play out in real time to see if you manage to subdue all the hostiles. While this stage is going on you can’t change any tactics or strategy and therefore I do not consider this a Top-Down Shooter or a Real Time Tactics game but more of a puzzle game, a very good and fun puzzle game but definitely not a Real Time Tactics game. If the plan fails you can always go back to the planning stage and tweak the plan and try again until you succeed. The graphics are low poly 3D that looks pretty good and gives the game a distinct look. The sound design seems to be pretty good as well with gun and flashbangs sounds sounding pretty good.
No Plan B comes with a pretty extensive campaign which you can play with all the factions and then there are community created levels and some custom levels giving the game some great replayability, all in all it is a very complete package for an early access title. I did not experience any bugs during my time with the game.
In conclusion if you like puzzle games and planning tactics then this is the game for you and at 13.49 euro it is a very reasonable price for a game that you could potentially get hundreds of hours with the community-built stages. Definitely a buy for the tactical puzzle fan.
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