Shelterbelt

Shelterbelt is a real-time strategy game of squads, cover and armour, set on a fictional stretch of the front in Ukraine. You command a company of the country's defenders against an unnamed invading army across Tykhovod Crossing: two villages facing each other over a river, one road bridge still standing, two fords, and the tree lines (the shelterbelts) that cut the sunflower and wheat fields into squares.

You lead squads, not soldiers. Order a rifle squad forward and the ground shows where each man will settle: green for heavy cover behind walls, houses, sandbags and trenches, yellow for craters, fences, tree lines and standing crops, red for open road. Then the soldiers fight it out themselves: they kneel and peek, return fire, go prone, throw grenades, drag the wounded clear and dive away from drones. Fire suppresses and pins; a pinned squad can still retreat to the HQ to heal, rearm and reinforce.

Field machine gun teams, mortars, anti-tank missile teams, sniper pairs, sappers who dig trenches, string wire, lay mines and build the vehicle depot, medics, and drone teams. Bring up an MRAP, an infantry fighting vehicle or a tank. Call in artillery, smoke and recon flights. Garrison houses and fire from the windows until the shells bring them down, and watch tanks crush fences and shells shred the tree lines.

Take and hold points for manpower, munitions and fuel while they connect back to your HQ, and hold more of the three victory points on the river to bleed the enemy's tickets. The enemy commander plays by the same rules on Easy, Normal or Hard: it captures, builds, counters what you field, pulls back its hurt squads and uses its own drones and guns.

Drone teams can be flown by hand from the battlefield, exactly as in Sunflower Front: the goggles view, battery, signal and enemy jamming, a recon quadcopter that spots for your whole company and an FPV kamikaze drone that dives on armour. The battle keeps going while you fly, and an alert takes you straight back.

Fog of war follows real lines of sight through houses, tree lines and smoke. Play at dawn, by day, at dusk or by night, in clear skies, overcast, rain or fog. A tutorial walks you through cover, suppression, retreating, capturing, building and training troops. Mouse and keyboard on a computer, or touch on a phone or tablet held sideways. Multiplayer is planned.