All Walls Must Fall review - the tactics genre gets a quirky new treat

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I have heard All Walls Must Fall described as a blend of real-time and turn-based tactical action, set in a retro-futuristic Berlin in which the Cold War never ended and where all matters of consequence unfold in the procedurally-generated nightclubs favoured by gay time-travelling superspies. Deep breath. Influences cover everything from Twelve Monkeys and X-Com to Invisible Inc, Superhot and - when it comes to the wonderfully grungy animation that chops together 2D character models and low-poly 3D backgrounds - the old Paddington Bear children's series that was so memorably narrated by Michael Hordern. It all sounds a bit complicated really. But it isn't. When you get into a fight here, All Walls Must Fall is gloriously, deliriously, skull-shakingly straightforward.
Gunfights are when All Walls Must Fall switches from behaving like a real-time nightclub exploration game (one of my favourite genres) and becomes a turn-based, grid-based tactical battler (which happens, rather neatly, to be my other favourite genre). You play as a hulking metal-armed killer who has been sent looping back through time within a single night so as to stop a bomb going off in the present. This means that time is as much his plaything in shootouts as space is. In fact, when you're exploring in the real-time mode, time is space. Each room you scout out rewards you with a few units of time resource that allow you to do all sorts of rewind-based shenanigans when the guns emerge. Time is space! Einstein would be proud. I bet he'd be well up for some futuristic clubbing, too.
Oh dear. I've made it sound very complicated again. It really isn't. Once the guns emerge a grid is imposed on the landscape and enemy targets are picked out with bright highlights. You can shoot them - weapons frequently have a couple of distinct attack modes - and you can dash around from one square to the next dodging incoming fire. The system's sufficiently kind so as to warn you when you're planning on moving into a square that means you'll be taking damage. The perks of a time-traveller, I guess.
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