BURNED HORIZONS (v001)

A cold, methodical tactical campaign puts you in command of a private military squad operating in an alternate 2002 Ukraine, where every contact can permanently reshape the people under your control. BURNED HORIZONS combines turn-based firefights with the weight of a persistent war: operators carry injuries, stress, grudges, and hard-earned experience from one deployment to the next. The tone is deliberately unforgiving rather than power-fantasy heroic, treating a successful extraction as meaningful as taking an objective. You are not directing disposable units across isolated skirmish maps; you are responsible for keeping a company functional when the plan collapses.

Combat revolves around action points, suppression, overwatch, interrupts, positioning, and careful use of cover, with multiple camera options ranging from top-down to third-person. Gunshot trauma is not reduced to an abstract health bar: a wounded leg affects movement, an injured arm compromises weapon control, and serious casualties demand field treatment, evacuation, or replacement personnel. Before deployment, you tailor armor, rigs, rucksacks, weapons, optics, slings, and attachments for the operation, while balancing protection against fatigue and handling. Operators develop through the jobs they actually perform, so a rifleman repeatedly assigned to breaching learns different practical skills than one who spends missions observing from range; trust, leadership capacity, and psychological SCARs further complicate how squads react under pressure.

Its strongest idea is that character progression is inseparable from consequence. A traumatised operator may hesitate, lose discipline, or become unexpectedly sharper, while relationships inside the team can make an otherwise sound order harder to execute. Persistent sectors and adjustable Standard Operating Procedures let players choose between harsh Iron Man-style stakes and a more forgiving tactical sandbox, while planned mod support promises room for custom rules. Since it is slated for Early Access, several major systems—including deeper logistics, strategic movement, vehicles, weather, base growth, and multiplayer—remain in development. Fans of Jagged Alliance 2, XCOM’s tactical tension, and the grounded equipment focus of modern military simulators should find plenty to watch here, especially if they value difficult decisions over cinematic certainty.