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411 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
411 reviews
Widely considered the best of Harebrained Schemes' three Shadowrun tactical RPGs — richer writing, a real home base to return to, characters worth following — undercut for a meaningful number of players by a long-standing soft-lock bug near the campaign's end that this review can't recommend around.
7.5 / 10
The 2020 game that started the shape-cutting automation genre, built by stripping Factorio down to logistics alone — no combat, no scarcity, no enemies. Cheap, historically important, and rougher than the sequel it spawned.
7.5 / 10
The best-looking Heroes of Might and Magic successor anyone has made, still getting factions and campaigns four years on — with an enemy AI its own players have been complaining about that entire time.
7.5 / 10
A city builder that abandons the colonist as its unit of decision and manages a population instead — tens of thousands of citizens, an empire beyond the walls, and an interface that makes you earn every bit of that scale.
7.5 / 10
A pixel-art roguelike duel game that fuses card-based deckbuilding with auto-battler positioning around a single risky idea — every summon draws against an energy cap, and overshooting it triggers backlash against you rather than your opponent.
7.5 / 10
A tactical fantasy co-op RPG built to replace board game night, with a genuinely standout value proposition — one copy covers a whole group of four — undercut for a large share of its own reviewers by a mandatory phone-as-controller scheme that several report they couldn't avoid even playing solo.
7.5 / 10
An RPG Maker-built spiritual successor to Ogre Battle and Fire Emblem with genuinely excellent squad-tactics combat -- undercut, by its own fans' repeated admission, by a story its own community tags call "Story Rich" and its own review corpus calls the weakest part of the game.
7.5 / 10
Square Enix's remaster of a genre-defining 1995 tactical RPG splits its own most invested fans down the middle — the presentation, voice work and orchestration draw near-unanimous praise, while the specific gameplay changes to levelling, permadeath and the class system have produced some of the most detailed, dug-in disagreement this library has read on any remaster.
7.5 / 10
A gorgeously art-directed Viking tactical RPG whose story and presentation draw near-universal praise even from critical reviewers — undercut by a specific, mechanically precise complaint that recurs across a full decade: the combat's action-economy design makes injuring and sparing enemies the optimal strategy, so killing them is often actively punished.
7.5 / 10
Eleven years old, free now, and still the most tactically interesting shooter ever made — with a store page whose 82% badge is averaging a decade of paid-game reviews against a free-to-play relaunch its own players rate ten points lower.
7.5 / 10
Widely regarded as the best-received entry in the Total War series (Metacritic 90) and still Very Positive on Steam — but a May 2023 update that stripped multiplayer chat, broke the Mod Manager and invalidated saves on a beloved 12-year-old game triggered a wave of protest reviews that, unlike similar incidents elsewhere in this outlet's library, remains unresolved through 2026.
7.5 / 10
A six-person Korean studio's XCOM-meets-Final-Fantasy-Tactics SRPG that has quietly built one of the most devoted fanbases in the genre — thousands of hours logged by individual reviewers, a mastery system deep enough to write wikis about, and a developer who reportedly replies to nearly every single Steam review personally, all wrapped around a translation reviewers compare unfavourably to the internet's most infamous mistranslation meme.
7.5 / 10
A well-regarded XCOM-style tactics game reviewers repeatedly compare favourably to the genre's best, undercut by punishing difficulty spikes around its wound-recovery system, a recurring Denuvo DRM complaint present since a 2022 launch, and a turn-ending freeze bug one 2026 reviewer describes as still unresolved years later.
7.5 / 10
A turn-based CRPG that hands you a voidship, a dynasty's fortune and the Imperium's blessing to do almost anything with both — built on a career system that turns absurd by the final act, and shipped rough enough at launch that its current, patched shape is a genuinely different game to review.
7.5 / 10
Some of the best-written quests and dialogue in any CRPG, wrapped around turn-based combat that knows what it's doing — and six years of bug reports that never quite stopped, concentrated almost entirely in the co-op mode it was sold on.
7.5 / 10
The most completely simulated economy in games, eight years of free updates, and one recurring problem — in a game about giving orders to AI, the AI is what 61 of its hundred negative reviews complain about.
7.5 / 10
A Warcraft III mod with over five million downloads gets rebuilt from the ground up as a standalone tower defense, elemental towers and all — Very Positive on Steam, but its own community is now its biggest bottleneck.
7.4 / 10
The fourth mainline Kingdom Rush flips the series to the villain's side and adds a pre-stage tower loadout, and Steam's 93.9% all-time positive score says it landed — but a loud, specific and consistent chorus of long-time fans call it the weakest entry yet, over tighter tower plots, trivialising hero balance and two paid campaign DLCs sold years after launch.
7.4 / 10
A 1997 Acorn RISC OS cult classic from future Deck13 co-founder Jan Klose gets its first-ever PC release — a genuinely deep 4X of colonization, law-making and tactical combat wrapped in a steep learning curve and a deliberately period-accurate 256-colour look.
7.2 / 10
A reverse dungeon crawler where you play the dungeon, not the hero — stock traps, hire monsters and watch a party of "heroes" die across a career measured in in-game weeks. Steam's 1,604 English reviews call it fun but thin, and the three post-launch DLCs are the corpus's single biggest sore point.
7.2 / 10
Read review of Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager
A minimalist Steam collection of twelve chess variants plus 400-odd puzzles from a small studio that clearly loves the game — elegant and cheap, but thin on true online multiplayer and, per its own achievement stats, barely explored past the basics by most buyers.
7.2 / 10
A voxel-art city builder that trades money and disasters for a strict web of building adjacency rules, turning city planning into a genuine spatial puzzle — Very Positive on Steam, with a persistent, well-documented complaint that its achievement-gated progression can trap players on the first map for good.
7.2 / 10
A four-dollar tower defence roguelite where the towers shoot themselves and you pick the upgrades — and whose players are averaging fourteen hours in its first week. The best value on this list, and the most repetitive thing on it.
7 / 10
The best-looking hero-collector on mobile pairs a genuinely thoughtful formation-based combat system with a gacha economy that turns its own leaderboards into the biggest reason to spend.
7 / 10
