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411 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
411 reviews
Reviewed the same day as its predecessor, this sequel draws a genuinely different complaint than the original — rather than being measured against Advance Wars for tactical depth, Wargroove 2's dominant criticism is excessive, often unskippable dialogue and exposition, alongside a specific features trade several longtime fans see as a net loss.
6 / 10
A solo-developed WWII hex-tactics game built for fast, objective-capture skirmishes rather than slow attrition, entering Early Access six days old with a working single-player campaign, online PvP and a map editor already in place — and next to no reviews yet to judge any of it by.
6 / 10
A solo-developed RTS that lets you drop out of the top-down view and fight alongside your army as a third-person hero unit — a genuinely distinctive hook undercut by a campaign that arrived late in development and a handful of real, independently reported bugs.
6 / 10
A fast-paced Advance Wars-style tactics game that launched with promised features missing and a genuinely broken economy system, provoking real backer anger — followed by an unusually sustained year of active patching that has narrowed, without fully closing, the gap between what was promised and what shipped.
6 / 10
A straight Steam re-release of the 1998 Nintendo/PC puzzle cult classic about raising terrain to hold back constant rain, published by trademark-holder Piko Interactive with no review corpus yet to check it against.
6 / 10
A ten-dollar guild-management tactics RPG with a genuinely clever idea — your weapon determines your class — sitting behind a 90% Steam rating that doesn't survive close inspection. The game is decent. The review page is the story.
6 / 10
A cheap, streamlined tactics spinoff that's held up reasonably well on its own mechanical terms for six years — until a company-wide Take-Two/2K Terms of Service change in 2025 dragged its recent review sentiment down over data collection and modding restrictions that have nothing to do with the game itself.
6 / 10
A polished, charming solo-developer "unlosable tower defense" incremental — enemies march toward your walls and fall into a river of lava every single time — that's genuinely delightful for its first island before veteran idle players report every later island is a reskin of the first, and undercut by the single most-upvoted complaint in its review corpus: unremovable pop-up ads for other games inside the settings menu of a paid release.
6 / 10
A genuinely deep double-prestige incremental wearing a crypto-mining skin, undone by a UI that assumes you'll join the Discord to understand it and a leaderboard economy built on premium currency that decays before you can spend it.
5.8 / 10
A three-person studio's ambitious mash-up of Total War sieges, Stronghold-style town building and a Crusader Kings-flavoured campaign map — held back by a jittery frame rate, a threadbare interface and a developer now selling the same idea for the fourth time.
5.8 / 10
A US$2.99 solo-dev idle collectathon — Pokemon's capture loop grafted onto a Forager-style island economy — that Steam's own review corpus calls "Mixed" for reasons that are mostly about launch-week polish, not the underlying design, from a developer who patched hard for five months and then quietly moved on to other projects.
5.8 / 10
A post-apocalyptic 3D colony sim from the team behind RimWorld's Combat Extended mod that launched into Early Access far rougher than its years of hype promised — genuine game-breaking bugs and missing basics, offset by real community goodwill toward developers open about the production troubles that forced an early, underfunded launch.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$4.49 real-time castle-capture strategy game with 108 levels and three campaigns — competent on paper, but with almost no community signal to judge it by, just three total Steam reviews and zero recorded concurrent players.
5.5 / 10
A WWII squad-tactics game with a genuine XCOM pitch and combat that works in short bursts, undercut by a morale system many reviewers call broken, a difficulty curve that persisted through a real rebalance patch, and a Season Pass sold alongside the base game on day one.
5.5 / 10
A neon cyberspace tower-defense roguelite from Clockwork Origins, released September 2023 with co-op and versus multiplayer, card-draft upgrades and weekly challenges, undercut by a design that gives you exactly one tower to defend with and no say over the maze around it.
5.5 / 10
A stylish roguelite spin-off of the beloved Dungeon of the Endless that split its own fanbase over how far it strayed from the original, undercut further by a co-op design where only the host earns progression and a detailed, highly-upvoted account of the game's DRM and telemetry connections.
5.5 / 10
A gorgeous, comic-book-styled pirate tactical RPG whose dice-and-deckbuilding combat system splits opinion sharply along one measurable line — reviewers who bailed within the first hour call it an unexplained mess, while those who stuck it out and actually read the in-game instructions largely came around, on top of a genuinely short, linear campaign with no ship battles.
5.5 / 10
Five years of development, a new engine, a genuinely brilliant tactical system — and an interface that its own 25,000-hour veterans call a nightmare, on a game that shipped missing features it had a decade ago.
5.5 / 10
A four-soldier squad, an alien invasion in the Ural mountains, and an action-point system where reloading a rifle costs almost your whole turn. There's a real tactics game trying to get out from under the jank — the question is whether NZ$14.75 is enough to forgive the jank first.
5.5 / 10
Read review of Future War Tactics: SOF vs Alien Invasion – Turn-Based Strategy
A dark fantasy colony strategy game steeped in Slavic folklore, praised for its art, voice acting and Darkest Dungeon-style sanity management even by players who can't recommend it. The mechanics underneath rarely earn the same trust, and day-one paid DLC on top of a NZ$61.99 base game became the review corpus's loudest single complaint.
5.5 / 10
A retro-arcade roguelite built around a genuinely clever idea — rotating a shared shield to reposition a four-hero party mid-fight — undercut by a crash problem this review's full read of the review history finds so persistent the developer built a consolation message for it instead of fixing the source.
5.5 / 10
A hardcore open-world tactical extraction shooter with genuine "Ghost Recon meets Tarkov" ambition and a playerbase invested enough to log hundreds of hours each — reviewed here through a persistent, multiply-corroborated PvP cheating problem several reviewers say the developers actively suppress discussion of, alongside two years of genuinely frequent development.
5.5 / 10
A NZ$1.46 one-person idle business tycoon with a real prestige tree and an inflation mechanic that actually works as advertised — undercut by a save system that can eat hours of progress and a developer who stopped patching two days after launch.
5.5 / 10
A beautifully scored, well-drawn flooded-world adventure that a real share of players who loved this small studio's earlier games call a step down, mainly because of turn-based combat several reviewers, fans and critics alike, describe as slow and undemanding.
5.5 / 10
