Sigma Theory has you choose a team of four agents each with an intelligence and strength skill and passive traits that make them better or worse in different areas. Each playable country is trying to acquire scientist to research technology that will greatly push forward advancement in different areas. You can hack other countries to lower their alert levels, find what scientists they have through hacking or having your agents travel and investigate, convince scientists to become double agents, extract or capture them on short missions that give you a few decisions that will make things easier or harder on your agent, and if you want to use researched technology yourself or give it to powerful secret factions for less victory points and probably terrible results for humanity but bonuses in other areas.

It's an interesting idea but it is all way to limited. You usually only have two choices, they are often luck based, difficult to guess what will happen, and sometimes its hard to tell what is even being asked of you. Faction missions will always play out the same way, extractions are limited, your agents might have some detail in their backgrounds but will almost never say or do anything interesting in the game and have no relationships among each other, the research plotline makes the game short and the game would probably be more interesting without it and the focused moved to expanded character and mission interaction. It gives you no real information about the actual numbers behind outcomes making it difficult to judge how effective some things are, many of the agents you could use seem like they would basically be useless, and intelligence and hacking abilities is so much more useful than anything else that there is little reason to go with any other type of agent as your game has no real reason not to play out in almost the same way every time once you know what to do.

Some good ideas and amusing every now and then but way too limited in everything it does and an even worse job explaining or making use of many of its own systems.

Screenshots: https://twitter.com/Legolas_Katarn/status/1205795812778754048?s=20

Reviewed on May 17, 2021


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