Drone Sector screenshot
Image: Icosphere & Microprose

With fresh footage coming almost daily from Ukraine, it's hard to deny that remote-controlled drone warfare is probably the future of war, and the nerds of today have always been interested in the weapons of tomorrow. Enter Drone Sector, making its early access debut today from Icosphere and Microprose Software. A hybrid action-strategy game about controlling a high-altitude command-and-fire-support gunship as it orbits the battlefield.

While there's been a whole lot of dumb arcade games about controlling a high-altitude gunship raining explosives down onto unsuspecting foes over the past couple of decades, Drone Sector lives up to the MicroProse name (a publisher famous in ages past for their gritty strategy titles) by being as much a squad tactics game as an artillery playground. Your primary goal is to guide a small, upgradeable squad of units through the battlefield, raining down shells from above to even the odds.

That isn't to say that this game lacks absurd numbers of explosions. This is not a gritty, realistic simulator, although vehicles have locational damage and the possibility of being partially disabled. The (now sadly unavailable) demo from the last Next Fest was a well-paced tactical challenge, and the diegetic perspective, slowly orbiting around and cycling through vision modes to track targets, gives it a different feel to most strategy or tactics games.

This initial early access run of the game has been well received so far, and contains ten maps, seven aerial weapons, and eight different squad types to command. Icosphere plans to add more of everything over the next 6-12 months, including helicopters (both enemy and allied), which don't exist in the current release.

Drone Sector is out now in early access, priced at £15.25/$17, minus a small 10% launch discount. Plans are for the game to increase in price as it gets closer to completion, with a full release likely within the next year if all goes to plan. It's also worth a mention that the game does currently use AI-translated placeholders for its non-English translations, but will be replaced by the final launch.