Spade Brigade

Spade Brigade is a march-and-order puzzle game about a column of tiny soldiers you can't steer. The Spades hop off the landing craft and march on their own: they turn at walls, walk off cliffs, and stroll into minefields and machine-gun fire. You're the officer on the radio at HQ, and all you can do is hand out orders one soldier at a time from a short field kit: dig, bore, sap, bridge, climb, parachute, crawl, sandbag, breach, throw a grenade, pop smoke, fire a flare, snipe, patch up the wounded, cut the wire, call in the guns.

The Mainspring's clockwork army holds every ridge from Shingle Bay to its fortress, and each Ticker needs the right answer at the right moment. Lob a grenade over the machine-gun nest's sandbags. Dig a pit for the patrol. Lure the tank onto your wooden bridge. Smoke the sniper. Crawl under the searchlight.

There are 37 handcrafted missions across seven campaigns: a beach landing, a misty forest, the trenches, the salt flats, a burning city, a snowy ridge and a night raid on the fortress. From the salt flats on the maps grow big and vertical, with more than one way through: tomb galleries under a mesa, tenements and sewers stacked storeys deep, a cable car over a valley, a fortress full of bunkers. The ground is fully destructible pixel terrain, and every muzzle flash and explosion lights it up. Each mission has three stars, for getting everyone home, moving fast and spending little, and medals buy veteran perks back at HQ. Pause any time: orders still go in.

It plays with a mouse and keys, or by touch with the phone held sideways or upright. Every sound and every note of the marching music is synthesised.