A top-down action game, the objective of Gain Ground is to clear each stage by defeating all the enemies or reaching the goal with your small squad of warriors. The strategy is in figuring out which soldiers to use in each stage, as each has a different attack mode (straight shooting, lobbing grenades, etc.) which serves different purposes. Your pool of soldiers spans characters from different time periods and locations, and more can be rescued from the battlefield, so a squad can be made up of a caveman, a samurai, a cowboy and a space knight for example.