Sabre Team

September 1994. On the desk next to my monitor sits a freshly purchased box of UFO: Enemy Unknown, and I haven't even gotten to it yet because a friend brought disks with some Sabre Team. That's basically how this game ended up in the dustbin of history — not because it was bad, but because it came in the wrong month.

Sabre Team from Krisalis Software is a turn-based tactical strategy where you command a small squad of special forces units sent on rescue missions. No alien invasion, no base building — purely earthbound scenarios with hostages, terrorists, and closed buildings you need to navigate from entrance to exit. The atmosphere is sober, almost militarily matter-of-fact, which was a rather unique approach for its time.

Gameplay is turn-based, each soldier has action points, and movement and shooting are clearly separated. Anyone familiar with X-COM will get oriented immediately, just on a much more intimate scale — instead of open maps you get building interiors, corridors, rooms. Every door opening is a decision. Enemies have patrol patterns and a firefight in a tight corridor hits harder than encountering an Ethereal on an open field. Controls are functional, graphics are solid for the era, sound is unobtrusive. Nothing that would knock you out of your seat, but nothing that would turn you away either.

The problem was that Krisalis originally released the game on Amiga, where it built a decent reputation, but the PC port arrived at the same time as a title that virtually defined the entire genre. Reviewers and players turned their heads elsewhere and Sabre Team went unnoticed. In hindsight, it's a shame — the game has its own rhythm and mission structure with emphasis on hostage rescue gives it a different character than mowing down aliens. Today it's aged acceptably. The turn-based system holds up, enemy AI is predictable but not entirely stupid, and difficulty is solid.

Today it will appeal to anyone who loves tactical games on a small, concentrated scale and isn't put off by simple graphics. It's not X-COM and never wanted to be. It's a compact, well-designed game that deserves at least one completed mission — if only so you know what fell through the cracks back then.