Genre saturation is a peculiar force in the video game world. At the turn of the millennium, you couldn’t walk into a video game store without knocking over promotional material for the next big World War II shooter (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault), simulation (Il-2 Sturmovik) or strategy game (Commandos).

Nowadays every game appears to be about zombies (DayZ, State of Decay, The Last of Us) or falls into the blockbuster military shooter boom (Battlefield 4, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Spec Ops: The Line).

For armchair operatives, the rise of the blockbuster shooter has largely been a disappointment. The boom in heavily-scripted action roller-coaster rides has presided over the deaths of the thinking man’s tactical game, dominated by tactical shooters like Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon and SWAT.

Tactical shooters have largely devolved into AAA console titles smoothing out the difficulty and intricacy that once made them special. Gone are the planning stages, go-codes and constant attempts at the perfect assault that defined games such as Rainbow Six: Raven Shield (2003) or the original Ghost Recon (2001).

Particularly nuanced attempts like the SWAT series have simply disappeared from our systems all together. There hasn’t been a single game since SWAT 4 (2008) that has forced players to confront and arrest hostile non-player characters rather than simply shoot first or stealthily scoot around them.

Fine control of a small team of operatives, a sandbox approach to tactical entry and consideration of the real-life challenges facing counter-terrorist and SWAT teams — these experiences have been missing from this entire past generation of consoles.

But the market is changing thanks to the rise of indie game distribution through sales platforms such as Steam, GOG and Desura and the crowd-funding possibilities offered by Kickstarter. We live in an age where a game developer can pitch their game directly to their target audience—and that audience will pay upfront for a gaming experience they might never have seen otherwise.

It is this willingness of players to fund games in development that gave Door Kickers the breaching charge it needed to break into the game market. Made by Romanian developer Killhouse Games, Door Kickers is a top-down, real-time tactics game with a lot of depth, all packed into an apparently simple tactical problem: getting a small team through a barricaded entry and clearing a room.

Due to their Romanian roots, the developers were unable to seek funding through the U.S./U.K.-centric Kickstarter and at first had to distribute the game through their Website. With strong word of mouth, the game eventually had a successful run on Steam Greenlight. No fewer than 25,000 copies later, the current version of the game is Alpha 7—with Alpha 8 coming this month.