"If they're into the traditional turn-based hardcore stuff, it might not be for them," says Julian Gollop, the man who gave us X-COM and ushered in decades of tense turn-based tactical challenges. He's talking about his new game, the colourful, easy going Chip 'N Clawz vs The Brainoids.
With its Fortnite-adjacent aesthetic and focus on co-op, Chip 'N Clawz is worlds away from the devastatingly challenging X-COM, or even the more streamlined modern incarnation. And when you're so firmly associated with a specific game or series, as Gollop is, any deviation from that formula can be jarring.
So his comment that he's not really trying to appeal to that audience might come as a surprise. But he argues that there's still something for strategy fans to be found within this new adventure.
"I think there's enough strategy in there for strategy fans, for sure," he says. But "there's not too much complexity," he acknowledges, "particularly in the way the game is controlled or the way it's understood".
But Gollop isn't worried if his hardcore fans aren't into it. "That's not a problem," he says. "There are other people that it would appeal to." What he really wants is to bring in new players, "people who have maybe not played any strategy at all".
While Gollop is most associated with games like X-COM and Phoenix Point, it's not like he's only ever designed games for that audience. Take his foray into handheld gaming, for instance.
"When Advance Wars appeared, which was for GameBoy Advance, I was absolutely overjoyed," he says. "I loved that game to bits." His appreciation for Intelligent Systems' turn-based romp can be seen clearly in Rebelstar: Tactical Command, a follow-up to his Rebelstar series from the '80s, which launched on GameBoy Advance and featured both an art style and mechanics that were not a million miles away from Advance Wars.
It's also worth noting that Chip 'N Clawz isn't Gollop veering in a completely different direction. It has a connection to a much older Gollop game: Magic & Mayhem. The spell-slinging RTS launched in '98, serving as a follow up to Chaos: The Battle of Wizards. It saw Gollop experimenting with real-time strategy, something he's doing again with Chip 'N Clawz.
"I guess to some extent there’s an influence of Magic and Mayhem on Chip 'N Clawz as well. Because with Magic and Mayhem, you embodied the wizard character. So you were moving around his wizards, and it was like a real-time version of Chaos. You were summoning spells, directing your creatures that you'd summoned, trying to capture places of power for your resource, to feed your mana, to feed your spells. And that also was quite an original take on both real-time strategy games and a more character-focused game."
When a developer makes something as special as X-Com, it's natural for fans to want them to keep making that kind of thing again and again. And again. But Gollop's already done that. Not just with X-COM sequels, but with Phoenix Point as well. With Chip 'N Clawz, he's trying something a bit different.
