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163 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
163 reviews
A game about ratios, throughput and the compulsion to make one number slightly bigger than it was five minutes ago, built with an engine precise enough to run that compulsion at a million entities without falling over. Ten years on, it is still the reference point every other automation game gets measured against.
9.5 / 10
LocalThunk's solo-developed poker roguelike turns chips times multiplier into the whole game — a review of how far that one exponential idea carries a run, and where the luck, the repetition and the small-screen text start to push back.
9 / 10
A colony sim that treats the AI storyteller, not the tech tree, as the main system — every skill point your colonists earn is really just raising the stakes for the disaster it's about to send you. Seven years and five expansions after 1.0, the total price of owning everything has become one of the review's own subjects.
9 / 10
The game that invented the deckbuilding roguelike as a genre in its own right, still sitting at 97% positive on Steam seven years on, and still worth the asking price even with a sequel already in Early Access.
9 / 10
A city builder that refuses to let any settlement become permanent, banking what you learn into a roguelite meta-progression layer instead. It is one of the only games in its genre to treat the endgame as a design problem worth solving rather than a state to reach and stop.
8.5 / 10
A tower-defense puzzle wearing gacha-RPG clothes, where the placement grid matters more than the banner history — and where the sanity bar, not the wallet, is the thing actually managing your time.
8.5 / 10
One of the best-reviewed games on Steam, and the one whose critics have played it for a median of 254 hours — because the people angriest about where it's heading are the ones who never put it down.
8.5 / 10
A tower-defense game where the enemy isn't units but a fluid — cellular automata standing in for an AI, spreading through terrain rather than pathing along it. Reviewed on its full lifetime and recent Steam review corpora, an 11-year-old cult favourite that some of its own harshest critics have played for thousands of hours.
8.5 / 10
Red Hook Studios' gothic party roguelike turns stress into a second health bar and turns your roster, not any one hero, into the thing you're actually raising from level one.
8.5 / 10
A free, story-driven tower defense game about an overworked magical girl reshaping a living barrier to hold back monster waves — short, and so consistently compared to Madoka Magica by its own players that the comparison reads as a shared, spontaneous consensus rather than marketing.
8.5 / 10
Nine years on, the game that taught Larian how to build Baldur's Gate 3 is still the sharper tactical puzzle of the two — a combat system built from fire, water and armour that rewards a party that thinks in physics, and a brutal opening act that punishes one that doesn't.
8.5 / 10
The 2022 Steam release wrapped two decades of the deepest simulation PC gaming has ever built in a mouse-driven interface and a proper tileset. The question worth asking in 2026 isn't whether the game is good — it's whether that wrapping actually solved the problem it was sold to solve.
8.5 / 10
The 2018 society-survival strategy game that made keeping a city's generator running feel like a moral crisis. Eight years and 136,000-plus Steam reviews later, Frostpunk still holds a Very Positive rating — earned by a first playthrough nothing else quite replicates, and complicated by a second and third playthrough that keep finding the same optimal path.
8.5 / 10
FTL's creators followed up randomness with certainty — a tiny, perfect-information tactics puzzle where every enemy move is telegraphed in advance. Most players call the trade a triumph; a consistent minority of FTL fans still feel the resentment the top positive review admits to feeling at first.
8.5 / 10
The 2011 browser game that helped drag tower defense out of the Flash-portal era and into a genre of its own, still sitting at 96% positive on Steam a decade after its 2014 Unity port — mostly because the core loop of towers, heroes and boss fights it invented is still the one every entry since, including Ironhide's own sequels, gets measured against.
8.5 / 10
A minimalist dice-based roguelike tactics game, originally built on itch.io, that's earned near-unanimous acclaim on Steam — with an unusually small negative-review pool centred on pacing and content depth rather than any fundamental design flaw.
8.5 / 10
A free browser incremental that spends its first ten minutes as a joke and its last hour as a genuinely tense endgame, built around a premise everyone already half-knows and a structure that keeps rewriting the rules underneath it.
8.5 / 10
Ten years on it's still the sharpest turn-based tactics game ever made, built on one brilliant, divisive decision: you are always out of time. The thing that's actually got worse since 2016 isn't the game — it's what you have to agree to in order to launch it.
8.5 / 10
A landmark, endlessly moddable military sandbox still going strong 13 years on — now facing a fresh, well-documented 2026 backlash after Bohemia Interactive introduced a monthly subscription pass for a game whose community has spent over a decade keeping it alive largely on its own.
8 / 10
You hire desperate men, name them, watch them die, and hire more. Nine years on it's still the best mercenary-company RPG ever made — and still arguing with its own players about whether a 75% hit chance that misses four times running is good design.
8 / 10
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
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
