Well, mark this down as one of the fastest introductory articles to preview turn arounds ever in DIYgamer.com history. Despite only officially announcing the game’s existence yesterday, I’ve already played a good deal of the press version and now have a gooey, creamy preview waiting for you to gobble it all up. Impressive huh?

When I first wrote about Reckless Squad yesterday I had pegged it as a sort of unique convoy-based RTS game while, at the same time, reminiscing about the history of the RTS genre as a whole. Well, since then, I’ve actually gotten to test out many of the claims the developer made about there game. Like with all previews, this is merely a development version. Any complaints I might have may not exist in the full version (which is why you should wait until our review before you decide to buy or not).

True to my words yesterday, Reckless Squad does in fact play like a convoy RTS. Each game starts off with a different whimsical story about why you are convoying. My first play through I was transporting a captured unicorn back to the castle because the King’s daughter wanted one so badly. On my second play through I was assisting Little Red Riding hood in getting food to her grandma. Each story has a sort of comedic manner to it and, despite some rough grammatical errors, did a well enough job of establishing what I was doing and why I was doing it.

Of course, the game is an RTS so, like with all RTS games there’s a hefty amount of dragging, pointing, and right clicking to kill enemies. All in all it’s a pretty standard affair. You’ll have your archers, soldiers, rogues and mages. Each class, obviously, has different obvious abilities making it easy to determine placing for your troops.

My singular problem with the RTS aspects of the game was that, while I could separate my troops into numbered keyboard formations — all soldiers as 1, all archers as 2, etc. — were I to attempt to separate them all and then also place all my troops into one big numbered formation it would cancel out my individual numbered squads, if that makes any sense. Basically I could either have all my troops individualized, or I could have them all as a group, not both.

Additionally, while I’d love to have completed a full game to relay my entire convoy journey to you, the game would, unfortunately, crash at the end of each second level making my convoys quick and easy.

Reckless Squad also comes with an “arena” mode. This is exactly what you’d expect it to be. Basically, there will be an endless amount of enemy waves rushing your wagon/cargo from four different points in the arena. It’s up to you to stop them before they destroy it. After each specific amount of waves you’ll get the chance to buy upgrades and more troops to protect your wagon.

At first, this mode was fairly challenging as you’ll only start with a handful of varied troops. However, it wasn’t long before I noticed that the game still requires a fair bit of balancing. It eventually got to the point where I had amassed a small army at each on of the entry points to my arena. As soon as any enemy would step foo into my domain they’d get obliterated by my forces. This made the entire mode incredibly easy from wave 20 onward.

Overall, Reckless Squad is a fun game. I thoroughly enjoyed playing my preview version, especially the arena mode. There’s just a few niggling little problems that I can see cropping up and ruining the consumer experience. If D2P Games can fix these problems I’m sure they’ll have no problem convincing people to buy their simple, yet addictive, convoy RTS.

Reckless Squad currently has no release date as the developers continue to look for distribution partners. The game is planned for a release on the PC and possibly Mac for the easily managed price of $10.