Thanks to inbetweengames for sending us a review copy!

Mother Russia. Spies and espionage. Mutually Assured Destruction. Proxy wars. The Cold War was a 50-year long war of ideologies and politics between capitalism and socialism, and the Berlin Wall became a physical metaphor for the ideological stakes. It ended in 1989, but what if someone were to Kickstarter a timeline where that didn’t happen? All Walls Must Fall is a tactics game set in a world where the Berlin Wall continues to stand over a century after it fell in the real world.

It’s 2089, espionage is still rife, the CIA and STASI are using time travel to maintain the status quo, and someone has detonated a nuke in East Berlin. Travelling back and forth in time over the course of one night, aging STASI agent Kai must visit the various nightclubs being run as front operations by various gangs, and find out how to prevent the nuke from detonating. There’s little particularly engaging in this story though, and nothing that hasn’t already been done in spy thrillers movies. The story is sufficiently self-contained for a spy story, but both of the game’s endings feel like they were paced for a missing story arc. The Kickstarter campaign reveals that a second campaign was indeed planned, but not funded.

The turn-based tactics of All Walls Must Fall plays out on an isometric grid. Simply click on a spot to move there, and Kai will move in time to the beat of the backing soundtrack. Exploring new areas rewards you with Time Resource which can be used to rewind time. In the Pacifist approach, the various doors, combat drones, and metal scanners that obstruct your way forward can be hacked to disable them. Approaching a guard on duty will open up a simple dialogue tree where you can attempt to intimidate, flirt, or butter them up, but the responses lack any subtlety or nuance. Conversations end up as a selection of random choices and hoping for the best.

On the Violence side of things, all commands must be confirmed before execution. Simply click on a guard to target them with your weapon, then hit the spacebar to confirm. Once all enemies are defeated, you’ll be rewarded with Time Resource, and then the Drop happens – time rewinds to the start of combat and replays your actions. There’s a primal satisfaction to watching the violence unfold to the beat, like the nightclub shootout in the first John Wick movie.

At the end of a mission, extant Time Resource is converted to cash, and this can be spent on various weapons and upgrades. Besides the basic pistol, there are shotguns, submachine guns, rifles, a Cyber Fist for melee and breaking walls, and the Persuador^[sic] which allows you to turn a guard to your side. Other upgrades are also available for your Time Resource capacity, health, additional weapon slots, hacking ability, and weapon damage. I discovered that increasing Time Resource capacity early pays huge dividends deeper into the run, as all that extra filled capacity gets turned into cash.

The base mechanics aren’t particularly interesting on their own, but Kai also has access to time manipulation. By expending Time Resource acquired during a mission, you can Undo time to redo failed dialogues, or change your mind during combat like a de facto quicksave function. Rewind reverses time for the world, but not Kai, meaning you can crack open a wall, walk in, and then Rewind to just before you blew it up and put the guards on alert. There’s a puzzle element to this ability, and I found it more useful during my Pacifist run. Trace Back affects only Kai, and it has some creative uses in undoing damage taken, reloading weapon magazines, and recovering Persuador ammo. It’s just ridiculously overpowered and turns all combat into a cakewalk. The game also offers a Permadeath modifier, and Turn Timers which causes you to lose Time Resource if you take too long to decide your next move.

The Steam page for this game promises that you can play however you want. It’s true that the beginning of each mission allows you to charm your way past the guards or shoot your way through, but in practice it’s just a matter of when you turn violent. Either you commit to a massacre, or you turn back time and erase your mistakes. It rapidly starts to feel repetitive around the third mission when you realise that every mission is basically the same. If you commit to violence early on, later missions will also spawn more Nemesis agents. These enemies are immune to your time manipulation and will force you to double down on the path of violence. The time mechanics feel like they have a lot of potential, especially the Rewind ability, but ultimately it feels like the developers haven’t given these mechanics a place to shine. That’s going to be disappointing if you’re here for the one thing that actually makes this game somewhat interesting.

A full campaign run took me about five hours. In that time I encountered a few bugs. The Rewind ability can mess with the visual projectiles fired by enemies, causing them to persist even though they weren’t fired by Nemesis agents. NPC chat bubbles will display over NPC dialogue screens. I also had a few crashes from the loading screen. The controls are also somewhat iffy as there is no way to interrupt or cancel a movement command.

The Tech-Noir aesthetic is a solid hit. The various nightclubs are lit up in neon blues and pinks, and the soundtrack fades and explodes as you pause or issue commands for your turn. It does get tedious though when every mission is set in a nightclub of some sort. Sure, there are bio-labs, computer labs, and storage areas for a bit of variety, but it’s still all set in various nightclubs. All Walls Must Fall is a spy game with no dark alleys, no secret park rendezvous, no winding streets to navigate, and no spy agency headquarters. Here you are in the thick of the nightlife, and yet it all feels so dead as the sprites flail about lifelessly around Kai, like an amateur-drawn comic book. I don’t know if I should pronounce praise for conveying Cold War dystopia, or creatively criticise the tedium.

To the morals now, and let’s address the elephant in the room first. It’s hard to miss the LGBT flag listed in the Steam description. It’s clear that the developers support homosexuality and sexual depravity. Every character in the game is male, which means these nightclubs are all gay bars. The Pacifist route requires Kai to engage in some gay flirting to seduce married men with the promise of an ethically questionable adulterous fling. The language in these dialogue options is quite colorful, “like a unicorn rimming a rainbow.” The F-bomb is here, s--- is here, and various concatenations such as f---face and s---head are also represented. I also learned, among other things, that foie gras is an aphrodisiac.

Now set that all aside because there is a much bigger moral concern here. While homosexuality is without doubt a sin (Leviticus 18:22), homosexual people are still created in God’s image, and thus still deserving of respect and dignity. inbetweengames makes an effort to portray them as human but it’s constantly being undercut by game mechanics and real world history. Kai runs about using men for his needs, and then tossing them aside. The mind-control Persuador gun is effectively a date rape drug, and the game encourages you to use this tool on others. There is no love here, no edifying characterisation. Every man in this game is out for himself only, whether for selfish gain, for sexual gratification, or to stroke his own ego. There is nothing overtly hateful here, but the root values this portrayal speaks to is unironically a far more insidiously hateful treatment of homosexuals than even the Westboro Southern Baptists could ever hope to muster. The most realistic conclusion is that inbetweengames is stealthily batting for the other side.

As for other moral warnings, there is of course a lot of killing – this is a spy game after all. One mission even has you killing a mark in cold blood, with your superior officer even insisting that you make no attempt to clear the victim’s name. A gang member executes his father. There is no blood, but bodies do persist. Zooming in on patrons reveals nude sprites, although the crotch is as flat as a children's plastic doll. The ESRB rating does not mention nudity, but I don't know if this is a matter of content differences between the Switch and PC versions, or due to lack of genitalia on the sprites. The game is free of any occult themes. True to the nightclub culture, alcoholic drinks are presented as collectibles, and hallucinogenic drugs are used by patrons in one of the mission lines. There is an option to disable language and nudity, but it’s very tokenistic. The language filter still allows all sorts of dialogue through and only blacks out offensive words, while the nudity filter still allows the sprites of topless men.

All Walls Must Fall has some slick-looking combat replays, but the spectacle starts to wear thin as the plot draws to its conclusion. Even putting aside the deep-seated hateful treatment of homosexuals, it’s hard to recommend this game when the mechanics don’t live up to their potential. This game seems like a hard pass, even if you’re in one of its two target demographics.