**Cyber Knights: Flashpoint Game Review** This is the best stealth tactics game ever made. I'm utterly addicted—it's my Game of the Year so far, even above other incredible games like Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. In Cyber Knights: Flashpoint (CKF), you control a team of mercenaries undertaking a variety of missions: heists, hacks, assassinations, extractions, and "legwork." You complete these missions on behalf of or against characters belonging to various organizations, including conglomerates, gun-runners, independent collectors, and criminal organizations—all of whom have complex relationships with each other (similar to the Trese Brothers' Star Traders game). At the strategic level, the goal is managing these relationships to secure missions and income while building an XCOM-style base to power up, maintain, and manage your crew, gain intel and advantages for upcoming missions, and progress through the main storyline. **Mission Structure and Stealth Mechanics** Most missions begin in stealth mode. Sometimes you have specific objectives (finding something at a hacking terminal, reaching a terminal or exit, ambushing a specific enemy), while other times you have looser objectives (steal as much as possible from lootboxes). Regardless of the primary objective, you'll usually want to maximize your loot collection. Your mercenaries have a conspicuousness level (hidden-hunted-spotted), and the main threat comes from guards who have their own awareness levels (unaware-suspicious-alerted). When a guard becomes alerted and you have a spotted mercenary, they know your location, can inform nearby guards, and will open fire. Combat effectiveness depends heavily on your weapons (upgraded through loot), combined with stats and combat-focused classes. However, stealth relies more on your mercenaries' special abilities, including the power to predict enemy moves and actions—similar to Invisible Inc, the former champion of turn-based stealth tactics games. Meanwhile, a "Security AI" manages your enemies, increasing security levels and adjusting patrols in response to your unstealthy mistakes and choices (such as making noise, being spotted by patrols, appearing on cameras, triggering laser wires, or having body timers expire or corpses discovered during patrols). Each time the security level escalates significantly, the AI takes major action—bringing reinforcements, increasing patrol alert levels, and more. **Strategic Trade-offs** The game truly shines in how it creates meaningful trade-offs within every mission. First, you face stealth-based decisions: you can spread out your mercenaries to potentially reach more lootboxes in time, but this reduces their collective ability to redirect patrols, disable cameras, and hide bodies—causing security levels to rise more quickly. Alternatively, you can cluster your team together for better cleanup, but this requires more turns to hit all primary and secondary objectives. Second, you must balance going loud with heavy weapons or going soft with soft weapons. You can maintain stealth using pistols and swords that make minimal noise, but sniper rifles and shotguns are loud enough to raise the awareness level of remaining guards, causing them to converge on the sound source. Typically you won't want to alert new guards unless they are far away or if you've already thinned enemy numbers, but often, it is the only way to get to the next turn because loud weapons do more damage. The balance between loud and soft approaches is crucial in stealth tactics games, and CKF executes this as well as only Invisible Inc has done before. **XCOM Comparisons** There are numerous comparisons to XCOM. I'd say CKF has the vision of XCOM 2 with the mechanical foundation of XCOM: Chimera Squad. By "vision of XCOM 2," I mean that XCOM 2's marketing and story portrayed your team as a stealth-based hit-and-run guerrilla operations group. XCOM 2 didn't quite execute this vision, because you couldn't return to stealth once detected, and reaching objectives in full stealth was nearly impossible since enemy pods were programmed to intercept you even when they shouldn't know your team was present. Cyber Knights allows for both the envisioned stealth AND hit-and-run gameplay within missions, executing the tradeoff between both approaches exceptionally well. CKF's mechanical foundation, however, uses an initiative-based turn order system like Chimera Squad. Your mercenaries and enemies draw random initiative based on their stats and act in that order each turn. The brilliant innovation here, compared to Chimera Squad and other initiative-based games like Battle Brothers, is your "Cyber Knight" character, who has unique abilities to manipulate turn order. This creates a cool and innovative gameplay element that increases both stealth options and feasibility. For example, I can make my teammate "Scourge" act faster to dispose of a body before an approaching patrol (who would otherwise act before Scourge) discovers it. One element missing compared to XCOM's mission design is the lack of doors. In XCOM, door-centric strategies were crucial: you could approach new enemy pods without triggering them by using buildings to block sightlines, then cluster near enemies on the other side of doors to flank and eliminate them efficiently in one coordinated strike. In CKF, sightlines tend to be much more open because the maps don’t have many doors! **Overall Assessment** I expect this to be a perfect 10/10 game within about a month. I highly recommend it. Stealth tactics games are few and far between, and are incredibly difficult to create because the tradeoffs the player encounters always have to be meaningful. CKF does this in spectacular fashion. As for negatives, there are minor gameplay bugs that I'm confident the development team will resolve within a month or so, and the main storyline could be tighter and have higher stakes. However, the core gameplay is incredible and every layer in the game is genuinely cool and innovative, choom. You won't regret buying, at least just to see and feel the tension that a well-executed stealth game can create. Congratulations to Trese Brothers on creating a truly innovative and exceptional game!