Developers AREA 34, INC. have taken to Kickstarter to gain funds for their new tactical strategy game, Tiny Metal.

The developers released a free Alpha prototype build demo to play, so I went ahead and downloaded Tiny Metal to see what it was like. If you have played Front Mission or Advance Wars then you’ll be able to pick up and play Tiny Metal with ease, but the game is a lot closer to the latter and borrows a lot of features from classic strategy games. Tiny Metal is in 3D with small cute character designs, and cartoon hand drawn picture art for the main generals and leaders.

The story is pretty simple, your home country is thrust into war and you must defend your land and fight off the invading enemy nation. The different stages have different objectives, but for the prototype the first stage just runs you through the basics of taking over buildings, while the second stage is a real battle where you are tasked at defeating all enemy soldiers and capturing their HQ, but you are greatly outnumbered and the task is quite challenging.

Taking over buildings is like taking mini bases; the more you own, the more money you gain per turn, and the more money you have, the more units you can purchase to send out to the field. So far, they had tanks, assault jeeps, basic infantry and rocket troops available for the prototype, but the below trailer showcases a bit more of the game and it has to offer.

When you get into battle there is strategy involved. Based on the terrain it will affect things like your movement and your defense, etc. When you attack enemies you will have a few options available to you based on your surroundings, such as:
1. Attack, this is your basic damage dealing move.
2. Lock-on, allows you to aim at your target for a combined assault, but it will skip your first turn.
3. Concentrated fire, this links with Lock on but it requires a unit to previously be locked on to the target. When you activate Concentrate fire, all surrounding units will attack that one enemy in an attempt to wipe them out from the firepower.
4. Assault, your unit charges the enemy and forces them to retreat to another space, while at the same time your unit moves forward to take that exact same space.
5. Merge, allows you to combine two units together to balance out your forces.

Depending on the environment you might also receive a few more options as well. As you can see, Tiny Metal gives you quite a few options to control the flow of combat to gain victory. The developers have released a Kickstarter trailer video, so take a look at the video that I linked below.

If you are interested in downloading the Prototype demo build, you can follow the provided link to download and play test it for yourself.

The guys behind this game are a few well known developers, such as the scenario supervisor Hiroki Kikuta who has worked on a few titles such as Secret Of Mana and Shining Hearts, along with the original story supervisor Hiro Inaba, who has worked on titles such as Professor Layton Vs Phoneix Wright and I Am Setsuna. The team’s main goal is to save the slowly dying genre of Japanese Strategy games, because they feel that the current gaming market has no interest in furthering this genre.

If you like what you see, you can head on over to the developer’s Steam Greenlight and Kickstarter page to lend your support. If everything goes according to plan, the developers say that they are planned to launch Tiny Metal around June of 2017.