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411 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
411 reviews
A visually striking return for the space-RTS series that lands as Mixed on Steam — the dominant complaint, especially from reviewers who backed the game via its 2015 Fig crowdfunding campaign, is a weak, restrictive campaign, and the developer itself confirmed in November 2024 that the game's final planned update would indeed be its last as it moved on from the title.
6 / 10
A free civilization-building idle game with real depth and a small, genuinely devoted fanbase, undercut by heavy "clone" accusations aimed at bigger browser incrementals, a design that repeatedly punishes the player for progressing, and a studio that appears to have closed down over a year before this review, with no update since.
6 / 10
A solo-developed, node-based automation game that scratches the Factorio itch without Factorio's build-everything-yourself demands, still in Early Access two and a half years in and still being actively rebalanced — most recently to remove the exact progression walls its players have been complaining about since launch.
6 / 10
A cheap, charming procedural-generation island builder whose own title promises more than the finished game delivers — a short, one-sitting civilisation puzzle rather than the ongoing incremental system a meaningful share of its own reviewers say they expected.
6 / 10
A genuinely novel time-rewind combat mechanic — freely wind time back mid-battle to try a different move — carries a debut studio's fantasy tactics game a long way, but a marketed "RPG" with no items, equipment or character building, and a story that thins out at the midpoint, means fewer than one in thirteen players ever finishes it.
6 / 10
A competent turn-based tactics RPG whose own fanbase overwhelmingly reads it as a scaled-down follow-up to King Arthur - Knight's Tale — simplified systems, reused assets and a roughly eight-hour campaign — sold as a standalone game rather than the DLC-priced spin-off several reviewers argue it actually is.
6 / 10
A long-awaited revival of a beloved 1990s-2000s fantasy tactics franchise that traded its signature systems for a 3D open world and split its fanbase on arrival -- then ended on a cliffhanger promising story DLC that never came, after its studio was swept up in the corporate fallout of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
6 / 10
A cheap, genuinely distinctive mashup of clicking-for-gold and tower defense, reviewed here from every single review it has ever received across every language — a real but tiny audience likes it, and its sharpest critic makes a fair point about how demanding the clicking itself gets.
6 / 10
A Cold War-flavoured tower defense about zombies on Mars, where the tension comes from physically running crew between turrets — and where the loudest, most consistent complaint in its review history is that every mission has exactly one correct build order.
6 / 10
A genuinely deep idle RPG that hooks its most dedicated fans for hundreds of hours on a thoughtful 72-hour offline time bank, undercut by an overwhelming pile of half-explained systems and a corroborated, apparently still-unpatched bug that stops the final boss cold.
6 / 10
A charming, Evil Genius-styled boot camp management sim whose base-building and art direction win consistent praise, dogged from launch through three years of updates by the same complaint — reviewers keep calling it a "waiting simulator" with too little strategy underneath.
6 / 10
A hand-drawn, isometric SRPG set in the Arton fantasy universe whose beautiful art and genuine tactical depth are matched almost evenly, review for review, by a resource-attrition system and a fixed four-character roster that a comparably sized share of players find punishing rather than rewarding.
6 / 10
A 4-player co-op tactical roguelite shooter from the studio behind Black Mesa, whose jump from Early Access to "1.0" this week delivered almost exactly what one detailed reviewer predicted it would — one new map and a few new guns, not the broader AI, economy and content overhaul the developer's own Early Access roadmap had promised.
6 / 10
A solo-developed Roman city builder that pits Caesar 3-style urban planning against the Hydra, the Minotaur and Cerberus -- a striking-looking game whose 1.0 launch, six months after it started, split its own audience between "finally complete" and "rushed and abandoned."
6 / 10
An ambitious, Banished-inspired survival city-builder with genuinely deep production chains, weighed down by persistent balance problems, a currently game-breaking macOS bug, and rumours of developer abandonment the studio has publicly and directly denied.
6 / 10
A solo-developed turn-based roguelike built around one sharp idea — retreating fills a curse gauge and makes the run harder — wrapped in hand-drawn comic-book art, released days ago to a market that hasn't weighed in on it yet.
6 / 10
Firaxis's boldest structural gamble in the series' history — mandatory "Age" transitions that force players to swap civilizations twice per campaign — split the Civilization fanbase down the middle at launch and still sits Mixed across nearly 58,000 Steam reviews eighteen months later, even as a genuinely major, free "Test of Time" update rebuilt huge parts of the game in direct response to that backlash.
6 / 10
A miniature-diorama tactics game that improves on Wartile's combat by its own fans' account, held back at its 1.0 launch by selection and mouse-control bugs several reviewers call game-breaking, alongside crashes that persisted past release despite a genuinely long, well-supported Early Access run.
6 / 10
VaragtP's puppet-theatre clicker arrived on Steam three weeks after Clicker Heroes and never quite escaped its shadow, but a decade of quiet patching, an honest NZ$4.49 price and zero microtransactions still make it worth a look — provided you don't mind that several of its 50 achievements want you to leave it running for a hundred hours or more.
6 / 10
A free tile-building idler where four resources, a pantheon of gods, hired heroes and three separate prestige layers build a genuinely deep economy — undercut by a pacing curve that early reviewers accused of pushing spenders toward its Amber shop, and a developer who hasn't touched the game's balance since 2023.
6 / 10
The trilogy's finale scores meaningfully lower than either predecessor — a severe, still-live crash and freeze problem compounded by the absence of a manual save option can cost players 30-40 minutes of progress at a time, and reviewers who loved the first two games widely call the conclusion rushed and unsatisfying.
6 / 10
Harebrained Schemes' pulpy 1930s take on XCOM-style tactics landed Mostly Positive with players, and cost publisher Paradox Interactive a confirmed $22.8 million write-down within a week of release -- a commercial disaster that split the studio from its publisher, ended patch support, and left global achievement data showing only 8.8% of owners ever finish it.
6 / 10
A Bronze Age Total War entry that launched to accusations of being an overpriced Troy reskin — then did something this library rarely gets to report: Creative Assembly publicly apologised, cut the price from $59.99 to $39.99, and issued partial refunds to every existing buyer.
6 / 10
A two-person team's espionage FPS split almost evenly between fans who compare it to Project IGI and critics who say its weapons don't hit as hard as its marketing promises — a complaint this review found the developer had already dated patches addressing within days.
6 / 10
