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411 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
411 reviews
A single-player deckbuilder in the mould of the tabletop games Ascension and Dominion -- draft a deck of gem-powered heroes and race to a victory-point target before the turns run out -- praised almost unanimously for how faithfully and cleanly it translates that board-game feel, with a real, repeated complaint that its five difficulties are cleared too easily to sustain long-term interest yet.
7 / 10
A real-time roguelike dungeon crawl where the resource system is a Picross grid — solve Nonogram puzzles fast enough and correctly enough to charge the energy that fuels every attack, shield and finisher.
7 / 10
A Greek-mythology tower defense roguelite where you draft cards to build the maze your enemies walk through. A week into Early Access, its loudest complaint — no reason to keep playing between runs — had already been directly answered by a meta-progression patch.
7 / 10
A solo-developed roguelike from Istanbul that turns career survival into a weekly trading floor — clear your student debt or get walked out, across three branching story threads and nine endings, for a one-time NZ$9.99.
7 / 10
A dark fantasy deckbuilding roguelike wrapped around a guild-management hub — recruit from ten heroes, send a three-person party into the abyss with permadeath on the line, and spend what they bring back on facilities that keep the next run alive.
7 / 10
A free roguelike RPG port of a long-running mobile game — with the microtransactions stripped out, a year of updates its own reviewers said would never come, and only 49 English reviews to judge it by.
7 / 10
A hacking game that uses the real tool names — nmap, hydra, nslookup — attached to a linear, guided mission structure. If you've never opened a terminal it's an excellent doorway. If you work in security, it's a puzzle game wearing your job as a costume.
7 / 10
A card-and-dice tabletop RPG that most reviewers call a genuine improvement on its predecessor in almost every way except the one that matters most in the moment -- the real-time combat every encounter drops you into -- from a small Australian studio that closed for good less than two years after release.
7 / 10
Ars Goetia's solo-developed sequel adds first-person combat, a real-time-seconds twist on turn-based fighting and a forged-not-found loot system to the original Hellslave formula. Three days after launch it is loved in English and considerably more divided in the Simplified Chinese corpus that makes up nearly half its reviews, for a reason the developer had already half-fixed by the time this was written.
7 / 10
A prequel that nails the "one more turn" feeling of Heroes III closely enough to sell a million copies in a month — while its own most-upvoted critical review, from a fan who loves it, argues the developers have spent their post-launch effort on competitive PvP while single-player AI and the number-one requested feature, team co-op, keep waiting.
7 / 10
A tactical tower defense from solo developer Tearevo built around one flying fortress under siege from every direction — a hex-grid network of turrets, resource collectors and support modules, split between grounded sieges and scrolling air battles, with a roguelite boost draw and a between-mission tech tree layered on top.
7 / 10
An open-world tactical RPG blending Final Fantasy Tactics-style grid combat with Uncharted Waters-style naval exploration and trading, whose deep class system and combat design draw enthusiastic praise from an unusually committed fanbase — while several of the same invested players argue the ocean between the good parts is too vast and too empty.
7 / 10
A zombie-apocalypse colony builder with a genuinely singular hook — using real-world map data to let you fortify your own actual neighbourhood — that's spent more than two years in Early Access with the same recurring complaints, about squad micromanagement and interruption pop-ups, still surfacing in this week's reviews.
7 / 10
A tightly-focused dark fantasy tactical RPG from the solo-led studio behind Voidspire Tactics and Horizon's Gate, whose deliberate streamlining reads as refinement to newcomers and as a genuine mechanical downgrade to the developer's own returning fans.
7 / 10
A gridless medieval city builder whose household-level burgage plot simulation is the best idea the genre has produced in years, sold on a trailer full of battles it mostly doesn't deliver. Two years and change into Early Access, the honest question isn't whether it's good — it's whether "still becoming" is a fair state to sell it in.
7 / 10
A genuinely excellent tactical card-battler from the XCOM team, buried at launch under a season pass and paid cosmetics stacked on top of a full-price single-player game, forced launcher software that broke performance, and — years later — a Terms of Service change reviewers describe in the harshest possible terms.
7 / 10
A genuinely inventive fusion of Metroidvania exploration and Pokémon-style monster taming with real tactical depth, undercut for a large share of its own fans by a late-game boss-scaling system that turns an excellent first twenty hours into a grind many never finish.
7 / 10
The Bearded Ladies' XCOM-inspired tactics game, from former Hitman and Payday designers, is Very Positive on Steam eight years on -- but its marketing promise of open tactical freedom runs into a review history that's remarkably consistent about a harder truth: there's really only one viable way to play it, and the game punishes almost every other approach severely.
7 / 10
A cheap, XCOM-flavoured tactics RPG that casts the player as the undead menace rather than the defenders for once, rough at launch but backed by a solo developer who has kept patching, balancing and expanding it for two and a half years running.
7 / 10
A bite-sized empire-building strategy game built to finish in under an hour, whose time-conscious pitch genuinely wins over busy players even as a large share of its own audience argues it isn't really the 4X game it's marketed as.
7 / 10
A Balatro-flavoured poker roguelike where every card fights on two fronts at once — attack from the top face, defence from the bottom. Its entire review record so far is written in Korean, and reading it directly turns up a genuinely coherent, specific picture the game's English-language silence has been hiding.
7 / 10
A relaxed, satisfying business sim about building a computer hardware empire from a one-room office to a global brand, hooking even its harshest critics for tens of hours before a genuinely broken product-scoring mechanic and a year-plus of development silence catch up with it.
7 / 10
A decade-old space colony sim with a specific, detailed design complaint at the heart of its negative reviews — one terrain quirk that some players call a fatal flaw and others, including a 900-hour veteran, call simple mismanagement.
7 / 10
A traditional roguelike that dresses ADOM- and Tales of Maj'Eyal-style permadeath dungeon-crawling in a friendlier interface and a satisfying meta-progression loop, held back by thin originality, patchy quality-of-life and a scattering of run-ending bugs.
7 / 10
