Games Like Ask Sergeant Major

You just turned eighteen when the insurgency broke out in the deserts up north. Ask Sergeant Major is a turn-based tactical RPG in the classic isometric tradition. You take one recruit from the enlistment bus to the front line — and how you fight is who you built. Action points, cover, crits, range that matters, and a perk sheet with real teeth.

Build a soldier, not a stat screen

Your attributes aren't assigned from a menu — you earn them. Boot camp is played, not skipped: push-ups, the run, and the marksmanship range each score an attribute — Strength, Constitution, Agility, Marksmanship — that your soldier carries into every firefight. Then choose your specialty — 11B Infantry, 68W Combat Medic, or 88M Motor Transport — and spend perk points on a deep, old-school tree: Bloody Mess, Toughness, Action Boy, Sharpshooter, Grenadier, Die Hard, and more. Two recruits, same mission, completely different soldiers.

Turn-based gunfights with weight

Combat is action points and hard choices. Every weapon owns its own range band — the 9mm, the tactical SMG, the combat shotgun, the scoped rifle, the suppressed DMR — and your hit chance falls off the farther you fire past its optimal range. Take cover or lose to whoever did. Land crits, manage your magazine and your reloads, throw frag and gas, set overwatch, and chain explosive props — barrels and shaped charges that go off on cue and leave fire burning behind them. Open a fight quietly with a suppressed weapon or a close-quarters takedown, then commit when it goes loud.

A campaign that starts before the war

This isn't a mission-select screen. It opens as a story — the bus ride out of your hometown, processing, the boot-camp montage, the choice of specialty — before the deserts up north ever fire a shot. Then the maps open up: a sun-bleached raider camp, a rain-soaked urban block of wet concrete and cold grey light. The enemy is a hand-drawn guerrilla fighter, not a faceless token: bearded irregulars who patrol, take cover, and shoot back.

Read it like a briefing map

A fixed isometric board in dusty desert tans and olive drab, lit like an intel photo — the classic isometric read, updated. Stencil type, gold-on-slate status chips, destructible cover, weather, and a quiet ambient score that hardens as the shooting starts.

Features