"We still haven't quite managed to form a bridgehead yet," says Jullian Gollop, creator of the original X-COM (before Firaxis went and remade it as XCOM (no hyphen) in 2012). He and I are beating back waves of brain-in-a-jar aliens in co-op in his new game, Chip 'n Clawz vs. The Brainioids, and this is the second time he's mentioned the bridgehead, causing me to detect just the tiniest bit of tension in his voice.Chip n' Clawz vs. The BrainioidsDeveloper: Snapshot GamesPublisher: Arc GamesPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out TBC on PC (Steam)"One of our buildings is under fire!" adds the disembodied voice of Clawz, not helping. In this moment I choose not to mention that despite my promises of genuine strategy gaming chops, I can't remember, exactly, what a bridgehead is (we are also literally attacking across a bridge, which confuses things a little bit). I throw down some turrets and nervously carry on with the whacking. A few moments of more zapping and combat barking later - during which I can't quite shake the sense that I am playing with strategy and tactics game royalty, an eminently intelligent man, and in the process being an absolute bonehead - my little personal crisis is averted. "We've got a good bridgehead now," Gollop says, almost to himself, in full tactical flow. Phew!Chip 'n Clawz vs. The Brainioids is a curious real-time action-strategy mix, not too unlike Pikmin or Orcs Must Die!, where you're on the ground adventuring and fighting, but also constructing buildings and defences, gathering resources and issuing commands. Gollop cites them as references, in fact. "Some of the levels we've got in here are a bit more Pikmin-ish, in the sense that you have to kind of use your minions to solve various puzzles and do stuff - although they're not as smart as Pikmin, I must admit."Bundled in a very turn-of-the-century 3D platformer wrapper, Chip 'n Clawz's levels - at least the handful of early ones I played - typically involve running around a map picking up little collectibles and constructing resource-gathering buildings, which spawn little miner troops that pick away at stockpiles of Brainium. This is then spent on more buildings, which generate melee or ranged soldiers - each one unlocked, during each level, by you finding and hacking a little podium somewhere on the map - which you use to slowly push forward through increasing defensive waves of enemies. There's a nice, light rock-paper-scissors triangle of counters and counter-counters, in classic RTS fashion: turrets are good at shooting down flying units, artillery units are good against turrets, flying units are good against artillery. There's also a snappy, controller-friendly tactical overlay you can bring up to direct them in smartly pre-organised command groups. Image credit: Arc GamesIt's an unusual pivot from Gollop's usual bread-and-butter - turn-based tactics games such as Phoenix Point, which adhere much more closely to the now modern XCOM formula (a series he joked he'd be more than happy to return to, for that matter, were Firaxis to give him the call). There are a couple of reasons for it, he tells me. One is to make a game he can play with his kids - the co-op element in particular being crucial - and he cites Nintendo's Pikmin and even Kirby and the Forgotten Lands as games that served as inspiration in their own ways, even if what their co-op amounts to is "a bit boring". And the co-op here is handled well: it's easy to drop into a game with a pal via simply sharing a code, and there are smart little touches like a one-touch share resources function that lets you give Brainium to your partner for them to quickly build or repair.But the other motivation seems far bigger, and really reaches towards a much broader point. That is: to "innovate the real-time strategy genre," as he puts it. "I think it's been a struggle to really innovate in this space. So I guess you could say Chip 'n Clawz is my humble attempt to try something a bit new."The issue, Gollop says, is with strategy games "you're competing with nostalgia, because you may remember how popular RTS games were at the end of the 90s, beginning of 2000s - it was like the dominant gaming genre in the entire world, at least on PC. And how they fell from grace, that MOBAs kind of probably killed them in some ways."I throw up a few suggestions of where there has been innovation in some form, albeit to very mixed results. Subset Games' efforts such as Into the Breach, or last year's wonderful Tactical Breach Wizards from Suspicious Developments, offer some shining turn-based examples. Relic's attempt at innovating on the classic RTS formula with the MOBA-inspired Dawn of War 3, less so. Image credit: Arc Games"I love those games," he says, "but they evolved in a different direction as well, because both Into the Breach and Tactical Breach Wizards are like these puzzle games, where the puzzle has this kind of complexity which is derived from the fact that you have all these different combinations of builds - but they're still puzzle games, because you actually have to solve them in some way." As for DoW 3, "they did try and do something different, but their audience was not going to go along with them on that one, it seems."It is, he admits, "difficult - very difficult - to innovate in that sense. Because we have, like I said, the long shadow of the classic RTS that's always going to be there. It's the same with turn-based games - I mean, can Civilization ever recover its former glory? Maybe not."All that said, it's worth emphasising the "humble" part Gollop mentioned above - I don't think Gollop will mind me saying that Chip 'n Clawz is not a mega-budget game with vast amounts of development or marketing money behind it, set to revolutionise a genre on its own. It's a small-scale, family-friendly game with some neat twists - the first I can think of, for instance, that mixes actual base-building, the thing so many old RTS-heads love, with on-the-ground third-person action in this way.But it will have challenges of its own brought in by the style and tone of the game, which to me skews pretty young. The old buddy platformer humour and wink-wink, pun-based comedy might also struggle against the more complex parts of the strategy (Gollop and I actually failed a defensive horde-mode level, admittedly on Hard difficulty - and admittedly he did have to play with me - but still). I worry kids might not be too inclined to play many games like this at all, if they don't already exist within a platform they're ingrained with such as Roblox.But the goal of doing something new remains, and it's an admirable one. "I guess you could say Chip 'n Clawz is an attempt to Trojan horse some strategy into a more third-person, action-style game that people are used to." Even if it only succeeds to a mild extent, it's another welcome attempt - strategy, as Gollop says, needs all the new ideas it can get.