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411 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
411 reviews
A genre-defying puzzle roguelike-lite set in a mysterious manor whose floor plan you draft anew each in-game day, celebrated with a 92 Metascore and widely called one of the most creative puzzle games in years — beloved specifically by players willing to take pages of physical notes, and marked by a real, still-unresolved design tension between its puzzle-solving brain and its randomised, roguelike-lite execution.
8 / 10
The Tropico 6 team builds a pirate haven up the side of a cliff, and the vertical construction turns out to be the best idea in city builders this year. The ship combat it's wrapped around is a dice game with no animations, and that gap is the entire argument about this release.
8 / 10
The first and, still, only video game built on Pathfinder Second Edition's actual rules, praised near-unanimously by tabletop fans for its combat fidelity and let down mainly by a short base campaign gated behind paid story DLC and writing that can't match its mechanical accuracy.
8 / 10
A 2008 tower defense game that still sits at 96% positive across 5,363 reviews, built around one clean idea — you can block a path, not just guard it — and honest enough about its own limits that its harshest critics are the players who logged thousands of hours first.
8 / 10
Every hero free, nothing purchasable that affects a match, thirteen years of updates, and a median recent reviewer with 1,078 hours logged. It is also one of the least welcoming games ever made, and that is not an accident of tone — it's the cost of the depth.
8 / 10
Bullfrog's 1997 dungeon-management classic, still playing the villain better than almost anything made since — re-released on Steam in March 2024 as an unmodified DOSBox port that the community immediately routes around with a free fan-made engine.
8 / 10
A genre-defining colony sim capable of genuinely unmatched emergent storytelling, undercut by a UI that even loyal thousand-hour players still call clunky, a brutal onboarding curve, and real, well-documented performance and bug problems that persist years after its celebrated Steam release.
8 / 10
A turn-based tactical RPG where you crew a living tank with a village of orphaned animal children, and where losing a boss fight can mean feeding one of them into a cannon — a war-is-hell premise this review's negative sample barely challenges, since only 5 of the game's 384 reviews are negative at all.
8 / 10
A comedic, Battle Brothers-inspired turn-based tactical RPG about a disposable band of goblin mercenaries, whose whimsical humour and genuinely deep systemic strategy have earned it a small but extraordinarily devoted following, including players logging well over a thousand hours.
8 / 10
A voxel colony sim that lets you build up and down instead of just sideways — vaulted keeps, buried cellars, and structural stability all become real design problems. Going Medieval left Early Access after nearly five years with a genuine endgame bolted on, and mostly earns it.
8 / 10
A narrative-driven tactical RPG about an insurance adjuster who has to deny a claim and save the world, mixing Fire Emblem-style grid combat with a fully voiced dating-sim layer and a time-management system some players find liberating and others find punishing.
8 / 10
A cat-breeding turn-based tactics roguelite from Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen, nearly a decade in the making — deep, absurd and genuinely inventive enough to draw comparisons to Darkest Dungeon and Sid Meier in the same breath, with real, persistent complaints about breeding tedium and interface friction that a major mid-2026 patch only partly resolved.
8 / 10
A factory game where your conveyor belts double as your ammo supply, so a bottleneck in copper isn't a spreadsheet problem, it's a hole in your wall. Free and open source on Android and itch.io, a paid one-off on Steam, and one of the most distinctive marriages of automation and tower defence around.
8 / 10
A bigger, more mechanically ambitious sequel to one of the deckbuilding roguelike genre's most respected entries, landing at 95% positive on Steam even as a genuinely coherent chorus of the original's most devoted fans argue this expansion came at the cost of what made Monster Train click in the first place.
8 / 10
A hex-grid roguelike that swaps a conventional deck for a board you draft and build tile by tile, from the maker of the well-regarded mobile hit Cards of Terra — hitting 1.0 to a small but completely unanimous chorus of praise after what several reviewers admit was months of criminally low visibility.
8 / 10
The game that brought the isometric party RPG back from the dead, and spent a decade being judged against a memory of Baldur's Gate rather than on its own terms. Fewer than half its buyers finish Act I — but the ones who push through average eighty hours.
8 / 10
A near-perfect 2009 strategy game sold as a 2009 build, in which the design has aged beautifully and the port has aged badly — and the complaints are getting more common, not less.
8 / 10
A turn-based extraction roguelike where every mercenary is a disposable clone, every mission can end in a single unlucky turn, and the cosmic horror waiting beneath the corporate PMC contracts is exactly as unforgiving as the combat.
8 / 10
A memory-matching roguelike deckbuilder its own fans nickname "Memory Balatro," executed well enough to hold a near-spotless Steam record, with the honest asterisk — raised by fans and by its rare negative reviews alike — that it borrows its structure from Balatro closely enough that some players see homage where others see imitation.
8 / 10
A turn-based wizard roguelike so uncompromising that its most-earned achievement sits at 24.5% — and whose only real critics are the people who loved the last one.
8 / 10
A falling-sand physics factory game — every grain, drop and spark is a simulated resource — that went into Early Access on 13 August 2026 to a near-unanimous reception, backed by Hooded Horse and pre-release press comparing it to Factorio, Terraria and Noita all at once.
8 / 10
A solo-developer idle/incremental game about growing a server farm from a battered laptop to planet-scale compute — three genuinely distinct minigames, a finite Singularity ending that Steam's own achievement data shows a striking share of players actually reach, and no microtransactions or ads anywhere on a NZ$4.79 price tag.
8 / 10
The definitive modern Civilization for most players, thanks to two expansions that meaningfully deepened its district-and-diplomacy foundation — carrying an old, now-dated controversy over a data-collection policy update, and a genre-standard but real DLC bill for anyone chasing the complete roster.
8 / 10
A lovingly built retro CRPG that fuses Ultima-era pixel art with genuine Lovecraftian horror and tabletop-inspired tactical combat, beloved for a first half that critics call nearly flawless, held to a lower score mostly by a well-documented back-half quality drop and controller support that stayed broken after a real fix attempt.
8 / 10
