The Rally Point: Messy urban wargame Khaligrad is this year's low-intensity strategy game for when it's blisteringly hot out

I was partial to a scrappy little strategy game even before idiot billionaires doomed the planet, and the UK to brain-steaming heat just when you thought we'd escape it this year. Khaligrad is plenty scrappy. Its edges are rough and you have to figure it out yourself, but it's more intuitive than it appears, and easy to operate once you discern some basics. It's scrappy too in that it's, well. It's Stalingrad. Not really: its world is so fictional it's their 15th century. But the invaders are explicitly fascists and the defenders communists embroiled in a long and brutal semi-guerrilla city war with World War 2 technology. Thankfully, it's stripped of any actual fashy or genocidal play-acting beyond each side doing "hail the empire/union" bits as a sign off.

I think that's why, despite its brutal and difficult setting, it's this year's entry in the long tradition of Low-Intensity Strategy Games For When Hot Why Hot Please Stop You Cannot See My Begging Tears For They Evaporate.

The UI. I have to talk about the UI first. Your view is top down over the ol' warhexes, and your clicking controls are basically fine, if a tad inefficient. But there are no keyboard controls at all. Not even for scrolling. The reflex to drop it for this (on the basis that neglecting something so basic has a strong correlation with generally threadbare design) passes though, for its maps are tiny and it's... well, it's good.

You get two campaigns, as the invaders or defenders, with about ten (I think always ten, but I'm uncertain) missions each, typically about establishing a foothold on a patch of enemy ground or defending your own, but sometimes there's a more free-for-all shootout or combat sweep. Nearly all units are infantry, but rather than attack and defence ratings or stats in general, each unit is made of as many individual soldiers as you've crammed into it, up to a limit of 20 plus two embedded specialists (unrecruitable, but sometimes sent by the brass). A little like in Songs Of Conquest, you can split soldiers into multiple units to give the enemy more and smaller targets to spend attacks on. But the cost is fewer concentrated attacks of your own, since every "attack" action means a shot from every soldier.

More severely, it's also more expensive. In between missions you convert whatever supplies you've won (it's unclear how this is calculated but seems fairly consistent with how you perform) into usable resources. Food is needed on a logical per-soldier basis, medicine for the already wounded, and you can even send soldiers or whole units in without a gun, either to scavenge on the battlefield or risk them on melee charges (or ambushes, if you hide them in a building the enemy enter). But each unit requires fuel, and more of it the colder it gets. New recruits are fairly cheap, but you then have to arm them, and there's no headquarters to stash the knackered out. Everyone comes with you. But you can skimp on any of these things, for their cost in morale, lives, and effectiveness.

The two sides tend to get different specialists too, with the notzis getting morale-boosting nobles and "butchers" who scare the enemy, and the communisn'ts more scavengers and defence-oriented engineers and scouts. They add their effects to their unit rather than any special attacks (with a minor exception or two), thus still play much the same, but with some implied inclination towards elite training vs pragmatism and graft. Missions and armies are small enough though that none of this is complex in practice - you can seldom field more than a handful of units (adding more is free but the fuel cost leaves them clearly doomed if you overdo the splitting), so even with specialists, the decision is still usually "move, overwatch, or entrench". Even hitting tanks just requires sustained fire - the animation is rifle shots pinging off armour, somehow killing a crewman maybe 4% of the time, but that represents that "ammunition" includes molotovs and makeshift bombs. For once, tanks do not spoil the fun of an infantry game!

Refreshingly, you can fire before moving, or fire on your turn and also return fire once rather than having to choose. Pumping bullets is usually worth it, too; this isn't the XCOM sniping contest, but one where you if you don't take the 11% shot you'll probably die anyway. As in real war most shots are expected to miss, but their volume means you might land a few, and every dead or wounded enemy reduces their ability to shoot back. Even misses can shake the enemy's resolve. But this is not-Stalingrad, so bullets become scarce, and retrieving them in combat requires holding position for a turn in a spot that may well be covered with loot because it's a terrible place to wait.

Armies tend to get smaller in the battle and more desperate in the war, and even a victory might have meant ending with dozen turns of scattered remnants exchanging a paltry three or four bullets, or finding that a single tank was more precious for absorbing 50 bullets even after its death (an excellent detail) than for its wildly variable damage output. It's oddly reminded me of Foxhole, when I've been stalking through a ruined city in the bitter end of a hopeless war, scavenging for supplies, picking off stray invaders, and covering a fellow straggler's back as we all freestyled through the porous mess of what was once a front line.

The AI is more active and unpredictable than I'd expected too, sometimes blundering around a corner into a brutal 22 x 65% chance to hit (and likely outright kill, these are not -5hp tokens but bullets), but sometimes taking shots at where they think you are. One mission had most of their army standing in the open, off to the side of the map instead of occupying the territory I was to liberate. The turn after one of my units stepped into their line of sight and swiftly retreated, they started blindly firing into the tank traps they hoped I was charging across. They tried a gambit!

It didn't work, since I'd made an uncharacteristically reckless rush to the target, leaving them badly exposed when my one tank flanked their way (also giving my infantry cover to finish the job). But if I had taken a different approach, or maybe not have that scout embedded in the unit, that might well have won them the war.

But the situation's severity isn't all one-way. There's an ebb and flow to campaigns. Barely holding out through a fight with 17 men and a blinded, immobilised tank left might earn a reprieve of fresh soldiers (making the notice that 43 soldiers reached level two but only 7 reached level 3 a reminder that you're getting so many people killed), and even the weather is not a one-way trip a lá Endless Legend.

Most refreshingly of all though, its campaigns are somewhat dynamic. It will even let you fail here and there rather than instantly end your game because everything in the universe has to be a bloody roguelike, as though we're sat here Milhousing coins into a slot. The inter-mission letters from command will berate you but, y'know, it's war. You're gonna lose a few fights. Not only that, but failure leads to different missions and supply/recruitment situations in between them. There are of course only so many maps, but when I failed a mission and was explicitly told I'd now have to retake the bridge everyone got brutalised for a few missions ago, I was impressed.

Contextualising it like that was resourceful of an obscure developer, and I'm entirely here for more campaigns using defeat as an alternative path rather than an end, or just a score penalty. It would definitely help to get the next mission briefing before reorganising, but I think the unknown factor fits its premise. You're trying to give your soldiers a fighting chance at anything that might happen. It's a desperate, disarrayed struggle through Urbanmech territory, not a pre-planned operation.

But despite that sense of desperation, and its grim setting, it is indeed low intensity. Turns move quickly, missions are short, and quicker players than me might finish a campaign in a few hours. The resource management is less complicated and more intuitive than it initially appears, and although losing half your force to a single artillery strike is painful, it feels fair, or as fair as such a game should be. The unpredictable reinforcements, variable missions, and sometimes sheer luck feel appropriate rather than punitive or timewasting. The stakes are clearly high for your people but as the player, it doesn't demand agonising decisions, intense focus, or complex thinking. Khaligrad is a scrappy little beast punching above its weight, and though a tad rough, it's as solid a wargame as I'm able to play in between repeatedly dunking my hair in the sink.