Broken Arrow

Broken Arrow launched on Steam on June 19, 2025, a $49.99 large-scale real-time modern-warfare tactics game from Steel Balalaika, published by Slitherine Ltd. It pits NATO and Russian forces against each other in 5v5 combined-arms battles, built around a deckbuilder that lets players assemble custom battlegroups from a huge roster of modern vehicles, aircraft, and infantry. It carries a Mixed rating overall, 7,768 to 5,363 across 13,131 English reviews, one of the largest, most substantively argued review pools this lane has sampled, and unusually for a Mixed-rated title, the negative side of that split is dominated not by scattered gripes but by a small number of extremely specific, heavily repeated complaints.

The foundational design earns real, credible praise from reviewers with deep genre experience. One detailed review, comparing it directly against WARNO and Steel Division, called it "a pretty inspired and promising take on the RTS wargame genre," crediting it for keeping "the 'good' from games like WARNO and Steel Division but ditch[ing] the tedious, complex and sloppy stuff... to make a much faster and easier-to-play wargame." A German-language review echoed the same conclusion, praising the deckbuilder's depth ("das Erstellen eigener Battlegroups... ist herausragend tiefgängig") and the visual spectacle of artillery and helicopter strikes as genuinely impressive. Multiple reviewers, including several who ultimately gave the game a thumbs-down, specifically carved out the campaign and skirmish content as enjoyable in isolation, with one negative review closing with "the campaign is actually pretty fun," despite recommending against the game overall because of its multiplayer state.

That praise sits against the single most dominant, most widely corroborated complaint in the entire pool: a collapse in faction balance, described by reviewers as tilting decisively toward the Russian side. Reviewer after reviewer, independently and often with specific unit-level examples, described the same pattern. One wrote plainly that "Russian armor/recon + heli units [are] able to instantly wipe some of the most advanced US/NATO tanks on the planet with Active-Protection Systems in a matter of seconds. Meanwhile Russian Tanks/Vehicles [are] able to shrug off a ton of tank rounds, javelins, sabers, and AT4/LAW's." A separate reviewer, writing after 68 hours and following the game since near its beginning, reached the same conclusion independently: "if you dont believe me load up a ai skirmish match and spectate as the russian units are just objectively better and more numerous... Russian shorad is better, russian anti tank units have more missiles and launchers and can decimate any nato tank (which cost 4X russian tanks)." This isn't a single outlier's read of one bad match; it's the dominant, recurring theme across reviews spanning hundreds of hours of playtime and multiple separate patches.

Closely tied to that is a second, equally corroborated complaint: a recent paid faction DLC, Russian Guard, that a striking number of otherwise-invested, high-hour reviewers describe as having made the balance problem measurably worse. One 280-hour reviewer, who called the base gameplay "great," still marked the game not recommended, writing the DLC "break[s] design rules from the other specializations" and listing specific overpowered additions, faster nukes, stronger stealth drones, cheaper MLRS spam, as "power creep delux." Another reviewer put it more bluntly: "New strong stealthdrone... Fastest plane in the game which also brings 30% more longrange missiles... Paid DLC was launched with stronger and cheaper units, becoming absolutely pay-to-win." That reviewers with hundreds of paid hours already invested in the game are the ones raising this complaint, rather than drive-by critics, gives it real weight.

A third major, independently corroborated thread concerns cheating and matchmaking integrity. Multiple detailed reviews describe rampant, specific cheating in PvP, one calling out "map hacks, unit stat modifications, immortal vehicles, ridiculous reload speeds," attributing it directly to "netcode [that] is client-side trash and [an] anti-cheat [that] is a complete failure." A separate reviewer flagged that the in-game report button "does nothing, worse it actually can't be closed when you click it," a specific, reproducible failure that undermines the game's own stated moderation tools. Layered on top of this is a widely repeated complaint about leavers: with minimal penalties for quitting mid-match in a 5v5 format, multiple reviewers described entire matches as effectively decided the moment a teammate rage-quit, turning close games into "slow painful death[s]" for the remaining players.

Performance complaints, while less universally corroborated than the balance and cheating issues, still appear often enough to be a real factor: several reviewers, including some with hundreds of hours logged, described "constant stutters, frame drops, desyncs" even on high-end hardware, and one specifically called out patches routinely exceeding 20 GB that "barely seem to fix anything." One review did push back on the broader negative narrative, arguing much of the criticism stemmed from players upset the game diverged from an earlier playtest build, but that framing sits uneasily against the sheer volume and specificity of dated, detailed complaints about live balance and DLC issues from reviewers still actively playing as recently as September 2026, and should be weighed accordingly.

Broken Arrow's underlying design, a faster, more accessible spin on the modern-warfare wargame genre with real tactical depth and visual spectacle, is exactly the kind of fresh idea this genre has needed, and its campaign and core combined-arms loop still earn real credit even from critical reviewers. But an unusually large, unusually specific, and unusually well-corroborated share of its own review pool converges on the same conclusion: balance has broken down in ways the developers haven't adequately addressed, a recent paid DLC made that problem worse rather than better, and cheating remains a serious, largely unresolved issue in competitive play. Worth watching for genre fans hoping the developers course-correct; a much harder sell right now for anyone expecting a fair, stable competitive RTS for their $49.99.