Victoria 3
A grand-strategy game brave enough to be about economics instead of conquest, four years and seventeen DLC later still arguing with its own players about warfare — and its newest expansion needed nine hotfixes in two months.
6.5 / 10
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Strategy reviews
411 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
411 reviews
Wargroove
A charming, adorable-looking spiritual successor to Advance Wars whose dominant, stable complaint across every year since launch is a direct, unfavourable comparison to that very franchise — reviewers who came looking for Advance Wars' tactical depth consistently describe Wargroove's combat and unit variety as shallow by comparison.
6.5 / 10
Warhounds
A turn-based mercenary tactics game that launched to genuine XCOM-starved enthusiasm and a rough, bug-heavy 1.0 — plus a specific, repeated allegation from multiple reviewers that it's a rebrand of an earlier, since-delisted game, which independent research on Steam's own listings substantially corroborates.
6.5 / 10
Whispers of the Eyeless
A dark fantasy strategy RPG that flips Darkest Dungeon's premise — you're the cult building up to destroy the hamlet, not the party defending it — wrapped in some of the most striking art in the genre and undercut by a tutorial that still can't explain its own systems more than a year after launch.
6.5 / 10
Whiteout Survival
A frozen-apocalypse city-builder that plays fair for the first month and then quietly hands the server to whoever's alliance has the deepest wallets — the honest question isn't whether it's generous early on, it's where that generosity actually stops.
6.5 / 10
Mobiles Tycoon
A cheap, ad-free phone-and-tablet design sim with real depth in its spec sheets and zero monetisation tricks — but a Steam score that only tells the truth once you split its mostly-German audience (90% positive) from its much cooler English-language corpus (60%, Mixed).
6.3 / 10
Idle Tower Defense
A cheap, one-tower incremental defense game with no in-app purchases and no ads — but its own vote-weighted Steam tags and review corpus agree the real story is a hard wall around wave 100-200, where the prestige loop stops feeling worth it.
6.2 / 10
Age of Clicks
A solo-developed hybrid that welds grand-strategy nation management onto clicker mechanics — genuinely novel in concept, but a divisive combat rework, opaque economy and buggy pathfinding have left its Early Access reception stuck at Mixed.
6 / 10
Agrivore: Incremental Farming
A survivors-style auto-harvester where you point a magic weapon at crops instead of monsters, built around a skill tree and prestige loop that a majority of players clear in a single sitting — and whose own achievement data backs up the negative reviews' loudest complaint, that one starting crop breaks the balance for everyone else.
6 / 10
Anno 117: Pax Romana
A perfectly decent Anno wrapped in one of the least generous packages of 2025 — a NZ$99.95 base game, a Year 1 Pass that doesn't cover all of year one's DLC, Denuvo, a required Ubisoft account, and a disclosed use of AI tools for in-game assets.
6 / 10
Arcane Survival
A 4-player co-op anime bullet heaven from Miki Games, built in Unreal Engine 5.5 and split across a roguelike Survival mode and a crystal-defending Defense mode — reviewed three days after launch against a store page with zero user reviews, no achievements defined and a character roster that doesn't quite match its own marketing copy.
6 / 10
A Total War Saga: TROY
The strategy series' Bronze-Age take on the Iliad drew a record-breaking 7.5 million free claims on its Epic Games Store launch day, then met a very different reception a year later on Steam, where a stack of character DLC, a fantasy expansion and even a paid gore pack turned "half the roster is locked behind paywalls" into the review corpus's central complaint.
6 / 10
Auto Chess
The Dota 2 mod that invented the auto battler genre now stands alone on Steam as a free mobile port — genuinely deep team-building strategy buried under a cluttered UI, a chest-and-key economy, and a shrinking player base.
6 / 10
Blade Prince Academy
A Kickstarter-backed, Hades-inspired real-time-with-pause tactical RPG whose combo-driven combat and dark academia art style earn genuine praise, undercut at launch by softlocking bugs, an unforgiving energy system, and dialogue-heavy base sections a real share of reviewers found hard to sit through.
6 / 10
Bodycam
An Unreal Engine 5 tactical shooter built around a genuinely distinctive body-camera perspective, whose reputation was badly damaged by a November 2024 update that stripped out hard-earned cosmetic progress and replaced it with a cash shop — the single highest-voted review this library has found on any game, at nearly 4,000 votes.
6 / 10
Breachway
A promising fusion of FTL, Slay the Spire and Into the Breach that entered Early Access in September 2024 and remains there today, with real balance and RNG-punishment complaints from deeply invested fans set against a genuinely active, recently restructured development push toward a 1.0 launch.
6 / 10
C.A.R.D.S. RPG: The Misty Battlefield
A tactics-and-deckbuilding hybrid from Way of the Samurai developer ACQUIRE that launched with a genuinely broken design decision — one shared deck powering an entire mismatched squad — patched into something more coherent within days, though a premium price and additional paid character DLC still leave reviewers split on value.
6 / 10
Circus Electrique
A steampunk Darkest Dungeon-inspired tactical RPG whose gorgeous presentation and combat earn real praise, undercut by an irreversible, one-way progression path that repeatedly softlocks under-levelled players — a severe, specifically documented design flaw the developer never appears to have patched.
6 / 10
Cities: Skylines II
Colossal Order's sequel to the beloved city-builder launched into one of the genre's most severe, well-documented disasters — severe performance failures, a "fake" simulation several reviewers describe finding through direct testing, and a real CEO controversy over blaming the community for backlash. This review can confirm, via the developer's own communications, that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox split entirely in November 2025, with a new studio, Iceflake Studios, now credited by a real, growing share of reviewers with a genuine turnaround since taking over development in 2026.
6 / 10
Company of Heroes 3
A WWII RTS that launched to a genuinely damning "sold as finished, played like early access" verdict from its own franchise veterans, still defended passionately by players with literally thousands of hours logged — and still, three years on, carrying one specific, unaddressed complaint both camps agree on.
6 / 10
Dwerve
A charming, Zelda-inspired tower-defense dungeon crawler whose limited number of active turrets and shallow upgrade tree left the Kickstarter backers who waited years for it recommending it only reluctantly, if at all.
6 / 10
Empire of the Ants
A visually stunning UE5 adaptation of Bernard Werber's classic novel that nearly every reviewer agrees looks incredible and just as consistently says isn't the ant colony simulation its premise promised — reviewed here alongside a genuinely substantial free content update that answers some, if not all, of that disappointment.
6 / 10
Escape from Tarkov
The raid loop it invented is still the best in the genre, and the company around it is the problem. NZ$85.99 to buy, another NZ$51.99 if you want the PvE mode, and a Steam launch so broken that 58 of the most-upvoted negative reviews were written in a single month.
6 / 10
Expeditions: Samurai
A party-based tactical RPG that trades Expeditions: Rome's serious tone and hand-drawn portraits for a brighter, more stylised Sengoku Japan — with combat that still holds up and an art and UI overhaul that a loud share of the existing fanbase does not want.
6 / 10