Hooded Horse's latest strategy RPG looks like some Final Fantasy mercs invaded the world of Battle Brothers

Say hello to Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades from 6 Eye Studios

I've been savouring the modest upsurge in turn-based strategy games about savage and malodorous bands of mercenaries, not least because it accompanies wordlarking as fine as this. Here to join the screaming pile of gushing throats and grazed elbows is Pathbreakers: Roaming Blades, the latest from Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark developers 6 Eyes Studio.

Hooded Horse have just announced that they're publishing it, which is lovely because it means I can write about a horse game this week that hasn't been banned from Steam for infringing upon Valve's ever-elastic content policies. There are no scenes of inquity so far in Roaming Blades, just good, wholesome disembowelment and the chance to blow up lingering balls of lightning. Here's the trailer.

I didn't play Arbiter's Mark, but Sin tried the early access back in 2018 and came away "quite" impressed. "It lives comfortably between too simple and overly demanding," she wrote. "I got through fights by being a bit careful but not obsessive, and felt that I could have done better if I'd taken it more slowly or studied the rules a bit, but that it wouldn't ever become necessary, and being careless would have cost me." The current version of the game seems popular among Steam user reviewers.

To my uninformed eye, the major difference in Roaming Blades is that it has a hexagonal grid, not a square one. The new game's character models and overall aesthetics are also more reminiscent of Final Fantasy Tactics and its ilk - I find them more assured than those of Arbiter's Mark, but also less interesting. I do like the carefully controlled swagger of the sprite animations in the trailer.

The basics of play seem digestible enough. Each battle has you picking up to eight units from your overall retinue. You've got an initiative bar full of portraits up top. Each unit gets nine points a turn for moving and actions. Beyond these rudiments lie the intricacies of special abilities, spells, status effects, terrain conditions and weather.

Your characters are a familiar spectrum of tanky sellswords, healing vestals, wildcat rogues and godless, crooning bards. Each class has a choice of two advanced classes once appropriately levelled. Outside battle, you'll roam around a procedurally generated island map, visiting towns, taking on contracts, raiding dungeons and participating in quests with several possible outcomes.

As boss merc, you'll make a reputation for yourself in broadly three ways. "Will you favor the traditional mercenary life or focus on the lucrative trading opportunities on the Isle and become a renowned businessman?" the developers write on Steam. "Or, perhaps, you'll don the mantle of a consummate explorer and discover and chart the numerous dungeons and secrets. Then again, why not a mix of it all?"

They're also going large on modding features, with "Workshop support, a map editor, a spell editor, and data files relying on easy-to-edit-and-understand json files". Start the countdown to somebody adding Ramza Beoulve to the game, specifically so that they can demote him to chief turd-washer. Mind you, we can't start the Ramza clock until the game has a release date. As of writing, it's coming to early access... soon.