Recruitment
Espionage
Counter-espionage
Exfiltration
Diplomacy
Tech Tree
Game length provided by HowLongToBeat
Posted on: April 21, 2019
Early Access review
flyattic
Verified ownerGames: 175 Reviews: 4
Fun title
Great fun , a few small gui bugs atm, simple but compelling gameplay. Not sure if they're adding anything but I hope they do and expand on it because it's a great base game. Feels very much like a board game in many ways. Multiplayer would be a very interesting concept in a setting like this.
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Posted on: June 24, 2023
Ravise
Verified ownerGames: 222 Reviews: 52
Computerized tabletop
The game concept is really interesting - agents, spy missions, diplomats... But there are way too much rough edges for the concept to become enjoyable. I'd really want to like the game better, but...: Basically no chance to catch up if you fall down the sigma ladder. Sigma technologies range from borderline sci-fi to flat magic. Fair money, free electricity, teleportation. "We teleported two of your agents into our prisons. F-you!" --foreign diplomat. Not only nations, but armed groups, influential factions, global organizations... your own government and your spouse. Relationship building is way too much busy. You will likely pass most of them without any interactions. What's the most strange thing to me is directing extraction missions. Your agent will call you and leave the decisions on you. How am I supposed to know the situation better? It's called "field decision" for a reason. I appreciate the spy aspect is focused on intelligence gathering, working with people etc., but extractions... eh. Linear - where you make decisions on behalf of your agent; via airplanes - but you need to smuggle the scientist on board; and even if voluntary, you need to overcome foreign nation's counter-intelligence. Yes, there are unique perks to every character, yes, there is large amount of stuff to interact with, but there is not really much "content". Sometimes you get offered missions, but you'll have to guess how to complete them. In my eyes, punishment for failure doesn't match success reward. On average, saying no is the safe option. Game like this would work as tabletop for a group of friends - but singleplayer on a PC? Fine 4 hours, but that's it - I have no need to replay this piece, especially considered the unsatisfying ending of the story: (spoiler follows) whoever wins the sigma race gets evolved to god, is able to manipulate time, decides to travel to the past and revert all research on sigma so the thing would never happen. Next round? Please, don't.
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Posted on: August 6, 2023
ErnestLemingway
Verified ownerGames: 255 Reviews: 20
Difficult but satisfying
Folks says its XCOM-like game, but in fact, it isn't. Sure, you are head of secret, govermental agency, but that where similarities ends. Sigma Theory is about politics, spies and conspiracy, so you more like leading CIA operation rather than full scale war. Your main work is to oversee researching of advanced technologies, that will give your nation edge over the rest of world. To do this, you will recrut scientists (in various ways), do some diplomatic matters, interrogate captured spies and send agents to achieve any of this. There's a lot of great mechanincs, like every agent has characteristics, that makes them more or less suitable for certain action or scientists and diplomats may be more likely to work in your favor if you gather some intels about them first. Sometimes you'll need to move someone from hostile country and exfiltration happens, what is cool and gives kinda 007's vibes. But as a game mostly about politics, every failure here is very pricey. Some of them are simply unavoidable and push you into quagmire, so you have to have plan B (or even C). But actually it adds some tension and weight to every decision you make. The bad thing is game itself barely explain you how different perks or mechanics works, so you'll probably fail twice or thrice before get the idea, what to do. Also, the pace is very high, so doing fancy thing isn't an option and casual mode isnt available. Technically its mostly ok, with some minor annoying features like flood of popups, occasinaly glitching interface and blocks of generic text, one for every event of certain category (unfortunately it isnt Jagged Alliance tier of personalizing content, dispite attempts). Overall its a great game in rather rarely touched genre, when you may feel like guy from 3-Letter-Agency, who command some secret operation on foreign grounds, trying to both please superioirs and avoid political disaster. It has some problems but I have fun plaing it, so 4 stars.
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Posted on: February 10, 2024
ChenSun
Verified ownerGames: 332 Reviews: 1
I like this game, but.....
I'm a big fan of spy simulation games, so soon as I saw this game I bought it right away. It runs like a turn based tabletop game with a cool spy theme. There's a technological race, you have to assemble your spy team and try to beat out the other countries. The missions get intenses at points and sometimes you might do things you may not want to do to get ahead of the competition. Keep in mind this game is all text based with images to help your imagination, like a tabletop RPG. There customizable features to make the gamer your own, like you can change character portraits, names, give them a all new set of stats, you can make it as easy or as hard as you like. The characters you choose from have stats that are easy to understand because instead of driving you mad with too many stat numbers, you only have two attribute numbers, one for smarts and one for strength, your skills are represented by icons with a title to explain what it is, I like this alot because I don't have to stare at the screen for hours reading off stats, don't get me wrong, I like my games crunchy too, but it doesn't have to be that way with every game. The simple stats and skills work really well for this game, I love it! I see some reviews complaining about how random the game is, yeah it's a tabletop RPG game so there are dice rolls, it's part of the fun for me. I love when my tabletop rpgs have dice rolls/RNG, it makes it fun and unpredictable I love the game "but" I don't like the fact that the story text never really changes, you get the same story text popping up in the same order. You have a spouse and every game you start off with the same conversation with your spouse every time. I would have loved for this game to have random story scenarios. The story doesn't get in the way of the game too much because your missions are always randomly setup, so I'm glad for that. You can also play with story off and that makes the game feel even more like a tabletop RPG to me.
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Posted on: December 4, 2024
LatwPIAT
Verified ownerGames: 104 Reviews: 1
Repetitive, opaque, and sometimes buggy
The game has a pretty repetitive structure of assigning agents to tasks - not unusual in these kinds of games, but made frustrating by the near complete opaqueness of what doing anything will accomplish or the probability it will succeed. It seems to be a game that wants you to play it multiple times, to try and fail until you learn which buttons you should push and which you shouldn't, but the core gameplay of assigning agents to tasks and rolling dice against hidden probabilities is probably not going to provide a very strong incentive to play the game very often to all but a select few. Buttons would sometimes not respond, in one instance locking me in a tutorial screen and forcing me to close the game externally.
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