izigame.me

This is a tough one. The game has it's good moments and bad habits:
The time between missions is way too long and the time to act on a mission is too long as well. You never feel the time pressure from other similar games like X-COM 2, where it is: "do this mission _now_ or suffer dire consequences". The consequences of not doing a mission are only losing a bit of rep with the corresponding faction. Which is kind of boring. Maybe you could be punished by not receiving ally-support from the corresponding faction for like 3 months in addition to losing rep.
Moreover, due to the fact the time between missions is so long, you only ever need one alpha-squad, because there is more than enough time to heal wounded recruits between missions. Having the ability to use only one squad, means the missions become rather trivial after like the 2nd winter, in the end my Sniper had 38 AP and was using 7 AP per shot and he had like 100 % hit chance over crazy distances. Combined with the crit-perk meant I could easily kill 2-3 opponents in 1 turn.
Since you only ever need 1 squad, means you never add recruits (I added 1 cook and 1 radio-man for convenience) and don't use the ressources the game gives you, which in return means: once you have survived the first winter, the ressource-management becomes a joke. For my last 2 winters I had all buildings on max (outside of 2 barracks, which I did not build, because I did not need them) and was sitting on max food, meds and wood. So the winter doesn't become a time of despair, rather a time of boredom because for 3 months nothing of note is happening at all.
The ally support system is not thought through well. In the early game when you struggle the most you gain the least support and later on, when you strive and have an abundance of everything you get shitloads of stuff you can't even use it all. I finished with 25k money, but only because I stopped caring about it after like the 2nd winter. The weapons-dealer is too harsh in the early game and too easy from the mid-game onwards. Once you've reached a certain threshold you just faceroll everything and have ressources in abundance. This feels wrong.
Also after a while you've seen every weapon there is - which is not too many. Sadly the only rifle that makes sense to use is the M1 Garand, as it has deals damage than the other rifles. Sadly there isn't a dedicated sniper-rifle, so in the end all my rifle-guys were using M1s and all my auto-guys used the FG42 (I was lucky enough to find two from dropped Fallschirmjäger-enemies). The heavy weapons are really poorly implemented and feel awful to use, even with the heavy-gunner perk on max. I would have loved to get better weapons later on, but after like the 2nd winter there sadly isn't anything to look forward to anymore in that deparment.
The missions are where the game really shines - which makes it so sad, that there is so little of them and so much time of nothingness between them. In the beginning the game is quite harsh, as most of your guys seem to not be able to tell the front from the back of the gun. Tip if you are starting out: build the shooting range asap and let your alpha-squad train every free minute you have. As soon as you reach a certain breakpoint the game becomes trivial though.
I would have liked a deeper combat: setting overwatch angles/cones so the guys I want to overwatch a corner do exactly that, instead of firing at the pixel of an enemy that entered their LOS accross the map. Also I would have appreciated the ability to shoot at certain body-parts to reach different effects. Like hitting an arm to give the enemy an aim-penalty or hitting the torso for a higher chance to inflict bleeding. Also I felt like the "hero-enemies" were a bit goofy, especially since you encounter some of them again after already killing them once (wtf?).
I tried to play every mission stealth only (if it was possible) - which was a nice challenge, as some of them were really tough to solve puzzles. It really felt rewarding to beat some missions stealth only. Creeping closer to the enemies to initiate and alpha-strike with overwatch was also very satisfying.
I really appreciate the effort the team put into the cutscenes but I can't overlook how cringy and goofy they are. The overarching story is really poorly implemented and I never felt any emotional connection to the main protagonists.
The snippets from the newspapers that tell important milestones from the war was a nice touch, although some _huge_ developments were left out, like the D-Day invasion on June 6th 1944. Not sure how the devs picked which events to include and which to omit. Maybe they tried to only focus on things happening on the eastern front, however they included the Wolfsschanze-Assassination attempt on Hitler, so...
Overall I would recommend Forgotten But Unbroken on a discount, as 35 € is too steep. I'd rate it 6.5/10. The missions were great, only too little with too much nothingness between them. I really enjoyed watching my squad grow from absolute noobs to being a black-ops killer-squad in the end. The combat feels satisfying, although I would have liked more depth. The game suffers from being poorly balanced. The early game is very harsh and punishing, from the mid-game onwards the game becomes too trivial and easy. I have finished the game on hard-difficulty and I do not have the desire to try the hardest difficulty.

TLDR: Not awful but needs a patch or two before it gets a thumbs up...
With a bit more polish, this will be good and worth the current price tag. There are enough different game-play layers and depth of tactical options to be interesting. The cut scenes and narrative are nice (as long as you can be charmed by the hilariously bad lip-synching and facial expressions - luckily I was). I thought the graphics were just fine (though I have been playing a lot of Xenonauts 2 recently, so...).
However, as it stands, there are a just few too many bits of jank (clunky UI, missing mechanics explanations, screen edge scroll that keeps getting stuck, etc) that gently erode your enjoyment and at least the following design flaws that aren't really forgivable in a modern turn-based tactics game and which make it fairly annoying to play:
- Your units won't stop their movement if they spot an enemy. This means that, unless you creep along click by click by click, you will almost certainly run into the detection zone of an enemy even if your unit spots them before entering their detection zone. For a game with such a focus on stealth play, this is a big drawback.
- Your units do not have directional overwatch - overwatch is either on or off in 360 degrees. This results in them taking the first shot that is available to them even if that is an impossible shot to make. In turn, this seriously undermines your ability to set effective ambushes (the first of your units that is detected triggers a 'scramble turn' for enemies during which you can only overwatch fire, so it's sort of essential).
- Some of the LOS calculations are frankly laughable but this isn't something that can be fixed - this game is using squares to determine LOS not visual LOS as in Phoenix Point, etc
- Many missions end as soon as the last enemy is killed, even if that's from overwatch or you still have units with AP left on your own turn. Loot that you don't manually collect is lost at the end of the mission so this often means the mission ends without you being able to collect much needed (and scarce) resources.
I'll definitely come back and change this to a positive review if the developer spends a bit of time to polish this up a little more. Right now though, given the range of choice for TBTGs out there, hard to recommend this one over all the others.

I will write a little longer and make a general reproach. Honestly, I've been waiting for this game since it was first announced. Although the xcom boom and success that has been going on in the market for the last 6-7 years and the increase in such games in the last 4-5 years makes me even happier, it continues to bring failure after failure. For those who make games, and I am a producer myself, it would be useful to point out this; ''Role Playing Games'' comes from the origin we call Tabletop RPG. Unfortunately, those who do not know or do not care about this are adding new failures to these failures.
Classified France 44 and this play are one of those unsuccessful productions. I didn't buy Classified France 44, but I researched it thoroughly and watched it from my friend. It is mandatory to have RPG elements in such games. RPG elements are just character skill trees etc. It is not. Two examples of these elements in XCOM are as follows;
1-Relationship between two characters
2- Personal characteristics of the characters that provide their advantages and disadvantages
3-Ability to customize the character to the fullest.
The most important of these 3 features is the third one. If a game is being made under the name of a detailed "RPG" here, the person must determine the character, country and personality of his/her/o (Instead of writing they them, the word ''O'' is sufficient in Turkish ^^) dreams in this role-playing game and present a role in own story accordingly.
In RPG, of course, you can tell the story of a character or it can be a character that you have written yourself and that the producer likes, but this does not care about me and other role-playing game lovers, and it even makes them boring. In the XCOM game that we call ''like XCOM'', there are 3-4 main characters and we can play them at intervals. Or in Phantom doctrine, we can make our own operators in addition to our 2-3 main characters. At worst, we can make the main character in Silent Storm. It can also be said that FBU is not categorized as ''RPG'' on Steam. But it is a fact that, first of all, it is a mistake to compare such a detailed game to games where xcom and other turn-based strategy ''RPG'' elements are frequently used. The audience of this game is looking for this content. The reason why XCOM is loved is that it has this content and has a sandbox feature. It offers continuous playability. Why would I play it again after finishing FBU? There are no new characters, the maps and the goal are the same. You can also look at the missions in other turn-based strategies that you gave as examples.
This was a general complaint. FBU was a game that I really looked forward to and constantly looked at on Steam since it was first announced, along with games like espioarcy, inzoi, paralives, and (plus life by you F) occasionally looked at the update notes.
This was a breaking point for me and I was very disappointed. I wish they weren't the same as Classified France 44.
As for the graphics, graphics are not important for this type of games, the same goes for sound etc., maybe animations.
I can say they are average in game. 2 points out of 5.
Although the base building really appeals to me in detail, it is strange how important it is in this game with ready-made characters. Instead of doing this, I would go to XCOM 2, download the World War II mod collection and play. Or maybe Jagged Alliance 3.
Let me say, I didn't even buy Classified France 44. I bought FBU.
Also,
The reason XCOM is successful is because it offers replayability.
FBU doesn't offer me that. If I wanted to consume entertainment content with a ready-made character, I could consume call of duty world at war or save private ryan.
In such indie games, especially in games that contain such "RPG" elements, if your graphics, interface, sound, etc. are bad, you need to add details like Mount & Blade. However, on top of these bad things, a ready-made scenario is presented to me. I can't feel those characters. I can't feel the game either. If I were given the ability to make and edit my own character, I could play Mount & Blade all the time and forget about those bad parts. Silent Storm is the best example of this.
The last 1-2 years have proven and shown me how much vision it takes to make a game like XCOM.
There is such a road plan in the future, maybe I will buy it again. But that doesn't change anything. Even though it doesn't resemble their events, it is an event like Cyberpunk and Kingdom Come Deliverance. These games also presented it as it should be before they were released and then made changes on their release days. I want to give this answer to those who are angry with me in advance; This is for me and those who are looking for x "XCOM like games"
and can't find what they were looking for in this game. The game producer has the right to tell me "**** *** and don't play this game, this is my game too". But at the end of the day, I am from a group that buys and plays. This is an article I wrote for those who think like me and play. I consider it my duty to be a light to those friends. It will be an idea and a consideration for those who will make such games in the future.