Disclaimer: Huge fan of the TBs - been playing their games since they were only available on Android phones!

Cyber Knights has always been my favourite TV game. I mean Star Traders is great, obviously, and they have a couple of unsung hidden gems with Age of Pirates and Templar Assault. Heroes of Steel is also a fantastic (and huge!) game which deserves a lot more exposure. But CK, even now in its aged mobile form, built back when multitouch wasn't even a thing and you had a slider to zoom the screen, remains my favourite experience.

Having a story backed with open ended gameplay and mission structure, taking on the jobs you wanted to do that suited your own role playing style, building your network of runners and handlers gradually throughout hours and hours of exploration: It remains unparalleled to this day.

Flashpoint takes everything good about CK and rebuilds it with a decades worth of experience and increasing ability on the developers part, and marks the Brothers' leap into a 3D engine to boot!

Missions are now played out XCom style, but aren't the most intuitive control-wise. Unnecessary extra steps are required for basic functions like moving and attacking, and what feel like obvious keyboard shortcuts are completely absent. There are voiced tutorial videos built into the help menu in game explaining how everything works, which is good because the tutorial is very bare bones. I haven't found a way to replay conversations which are had mid battle, or a way to see a detailed breakdown of the steps required on your mission beyond the most recent (i.e. current) objective.

Still, this is as early as early access gets, so I expect it will improve over time. The devs tend to throw hundreds of updates out over the life of their games, and I guarantee CK: Flashpoint will be no different.

There's a lot of depth to the combat despite my complaints above, with flanking and height bonuses all coming into play, full and partial cover, and a huge stealth component where you can disrupt security cameras, distract guards, used silenced weapons and try to avoid alerting the gradually increasing suspicion throughout each mission.

For an early access game, this is pretty feature complete, bar some base building components which aren't implemented yet. These are in the pipeline through, and I've genuinely never known the brothers to short change anyone with any of their games, so if you're on the fence, wishlist Cyber Knights: Flashpoint today and follow its development!