It always seemed a misconceived project for Bethesda to have funded back in 2001, an uninspired quest pack, not even an expansion, to Fallout 2. As the name suggests, it's a squad tactical TBS. Admittedly, that was one of Fallout's strengths... for an RPG. It was counted a strength as long as the focus lay elsewhere. Unfortunately "Tactics" truncated Fallout's excellent use of the roleplaying rags to riches escalation, by starting you out as an armed and armored soldier. It seems heavy on the backstory but absent its integration into gameplay. Most jarringly, trivializing Fallout's overland map only emphasizes how much the series banked on its exploration aspect - which the later 3D releases proved all the more true by their popularity.
Don't get me wrong, from the first couple of missions Tactics seems a decent enough squad TBS... except for the part where the X-Com games had already been kicking everyone's ass in that department for over half a decade. "Decent enough" was not good enough to compete within the same limitations. I'm seeing quite a few improvements to Fallout's inventory and combat mechanics, most importantly stances and cover, but at the same time the lack of a grid results in a lot of frustrating imprecision as to what constitutes said cover, or passable/impassable terrain, etc. While I'm not mourning my $3 bereavement, I do believe I'll be uninstalling it now. After all, I've also been playing this:
The more recent Fallout-inspired RPGs like Dead State or Wasteland 2, despite their flaws, would put Fallout Tactics to shame. But, more importantly, after a fifteen year slump, computer games have once again been growing in complexity and scale, to the point where tactical squad management can form only one facet of a larger product. That second screenshot's a run of the mill combat encounter from Age of Wonders: Planetfall. It tries to mix planetary conquest TBS a la Alpha Centauri with the AoW series' long-standing emphasis on squad tactics for individual combat encounters - with mixed results, but impressive nonetheless. Naval battles, assaulting reinforced bases, charging down exposed bridges, maneuvering through dense forests, I suspect that in just my current campaign I've accumulated more diverse six-unit encounters than the sum of Fallout Tactics' missions, and they're contextualized within a larger narrative partly of my own making: the spread of my kingdom across a predominantly arctic, mountainous planet of my choosing.
The old genres resulted partly from technological limitations and partly from companies deliberately shortchanging their customers. Having clear, simple product definitions facilitates the shovelware they love to shovel down players' throats. So where do we stand now that technology has advanced enough to be scalable and the braindead mass-market is enthralled by Fruit Ninja, leaving real computer games on the industry's fringes? While some genres' different modes of interaction are difficult to reconcile, in most cases they should be converging into multifaceted gestalts. Good storytelling should not prevent a role-playing game from having strategic and tactical depth, or base-building or kingdom management and "first-person shooter" merely describes an interface which could well be applied to a game with complex crafting and economics. All games ideally tend toward The Matrix - infinite scope, infinite complexity, infinite persistence, seamless immersion. "Genres" are only approximations of that ideal from different angles, and the angles are widening.
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