What I will remember most about my time with Falling Skies is Lori James.

Lori James is a hard-faced, hard-talking, gravel-voiced, flannel-wearing lady with a rocket launcher whose cartoonishly brusque acquaintance I made early in my travels, as I was putting bullets in the thoraxes of every alien scumbag I laid eyes on. She was always the first with a mean-spirited, badass quip when I put an enemy down for good. When I moved her across the grid to new cover, she would announce she was “En roo-tay!” If I made her defend or skip her turn so I could get folks in place before killing something, she'd yell “When does the fun part start?!” When she took damage from some alien who wasn't even on screen until I turned the wrong corner, instead of standing there bleeding to death like her lower-leveled, stock character compatriates, she just got angry.

I will look back fondly on my time with Miss James. I don't think I can say the same about the rest of the game.

Falling Skies is based on one a TNT how about survivors fighting the good fight after an alien race, the Espheni, comes down and wreaks havoc over a countryside the show keeps trying to tell us isn't Canada. The game takes place between the third and fourth seasons, but if it weren't for the opening chapter and the occasional unskippable exposition scene every couple of hours, you'd never know it was related to the show. Aside from the occasional appearance of voices from the show, and the Espheni themselves, there's nothing terribly distinct about Falling Skies as a game, whose influence, 's training system, which allows recruits to be dispatched to obtain information and resources while the main team does the dirty work. It's a good, underutilized idea, but what made Brotherhood's system worthwhile was the possibility of failure; my gopher in Falling Skies, a scrappy young lady named Nadine, never failed once across dozens of recon missions. After five or six missions, she was leveled higher than my main crew, and I was drowning in food and new recruits, with nothing to spend them on once I spent the meager amount required to create new pistols, shotguns, and armor.

Falling Skies picked a fun, unique genre to hitch its wagon to, but it's woefully behind the curve. There’s not enough of the television series in it to make it interesting, and frequent strategists will breeze through it in a weekend. The end result is a game without an audience. TNT may know drama, but unless Capcom's secretly working on Rizzoli & Isles vs Phoenix Wright, it’s better off staying out of games.