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163 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
163 reviews
A voxel colony sim that lets you build up and down instead of just sideways — vaulted keeps, buried cellars, and structural stability all become real design problems. Going Medieval left Early Access after nearly five years with a genuine endgame bolted on, and mostly earns it.
8 / 10
A cat-breeding turn-based tactics roguelite from Binding of Isaac creator Edmund McMillen, nearly a decade in the making — deep, absurd and genuinely inventive enough to draw comparisons to Darkest Dungeon and Sid Meier in the same breath, with real, persistent complaints about breeding tedium and interface friction that a major mid-2026 patch only partly resolved.
8 / 10
A factory game where your conveyor belts double as your ammo supply, so a bottleneck in copper isn't a spreadsheet problem, it's a hole in your wall. Free and open source on Android and itch.io, a paid one-off on Steam, and one of the most distinctive marriages of automation and tower defence around.
8 / 10
A bigger, more mechanically ambitious sequel to one of the deckbuilding roguelike genre's most respected entries, landing at 95% positive on Steam even as a genuinely coherent chorus of the original's most devoted fans argue this expansion came at the cost of what made Monster Train click in the first place.
8 / 10
A hex-grid roguelike that swaps a conventional deck for a board you draft and build tile by tile, from the maker of the well-regarded mobile hit Cards of Terra — hitting 1.0 to a small but completely unanimous chorus of praise after what several reviewers admit was months of criminally low visibility.
8 / 10
The game that brought the isometric party RPG back from the dead, and spent a decade being judged against a memory of Baldur's Gate rather than on its own terms. Fewer than half its buyers finish Act I — but the ones who push through average eighty hours.
8 / 10
A near-perfect 2009 strategy game sold as a 2009 build, in which the design has aged beautifully and the port has aged badly — and the complaints are getting more common, not less.
8 / 10
A turn-based extraction roguelike where every mercenary is a disposable clone, every mission can end in a single unlucky turn, and the cosmic horror waiting beneath the corporate PMC contracts is exactly as unforgiving as the combat.
8 / 10
A turn-based wizard roguelike so uncompromising that its most-earned achievement sits at 24.5% — and whose only real critics are the people who loved the last one.
8 / 10
The definitive modern Civilization for most players, thanks to two expansions that meaningfully deepened its district-and-diplomacy foundation — carrying an old, now-dated controversy over a data-collection policy update, and a genre-standard but real DLC bill for anyone chasing the complete roster.
8 / 10
A small Paris studio built a turn-based CRPG on Dungeons & Dragons' free 5.1 rules document rather than a paid brand license, and the result plays closer to an actual tabletop session than any of its bigger-budget rivals — verticality, light and darkness included — while looking and sounding like exactly the smaller production it is.
8 / 10
A tile-by-tile spaceship colony sim where you build the hull, route the gas pipes, and keep a crew of civilians fed, breathing, and sane while you search a procedural galaxy for a new home. Reached 1.0 in May 2026 after six years in Early Access.
8 / 10
A grid-tactics deckbuilder that fuses Into the Breach-style positioning with a real card engine and a Space Invaders-flavoured alien assault, backed by a Metacritic 85 and an Overwhelmingly Positive Steam score — with real, specific complaints about UI clarity and balance outliers sitting underneath the acclaim.
8 / 10
A build-crafting incremental about small creatures smashing a rock for wealth, where the usual "number always goes up" comfort is replaced by permanent choices that can genuinely sabotage a run.
8 / 10
A minimalist build-by-day, defend-by-night strategy game from a two-person studio that became a genuine indie hit — reviewed on its full post-1.0 record, including an achievement curve that maps exactly where players stop, and the small, sold-off, still-supported story behind it.
8 / 10
A city builder where the antagonist isn't a raid or a monster roster but a drought timer, and every dam, canal and reservoir you build is really an answer to a scheduling problem. Beavers are the theme; water is the game.
8 / 10
A tactics RPG built on genuine terrain manipulation and a persuasion-driven branching story, from the producer behind Bravely Default and Octopath Traveler — and a game whose own Steam reviews argue at length about just how much dialogue sits between its battles.
8 / 10
A tactical fantasy RPG where you never actually give a combat order — you write a standing set of instructions for each unit and then watch your army carry them out, which makes it one of the closest things a big-budget console release has come to an automation game.
8 / 10
The deckbuilder that removed the luck. You see every reward in advance and rebuild your deck between every fight — which makes it the most controllable game in its genre, and is exactly why some players bounce off it. Six dollars, 251 achievements, and criminally under-noticed.
8 / 10
Shiro Games' open-world mercenary RPG treats a company of sellswords as a small business — wages, food, gear repair and prisoners are the real spreadsheet, and combat is what happens when that spreadsheet goes wrong.
8 / 10
A procedural storytelling tactical RPG that follows the same handful of heroes from their first pitchfork fight to old age, generating genuinely moving personal arcs — until enough playthroughs reveal the same event templates repeating underneath the charm.
8 / 10
Orangepixel's turn-based space roguelike gets a time-loop makeover, and the smartest decision it makes is turning "you died" into "you left something behind" instead of "start over."
7.8 / 10
A quarter-century-old RTS landmark, still played and beloved by a genuinely intergenerational audience — and, since early 2025, at the center of a real controversy among its own most dedicated veterans over new Three Kingdoms civilizations they say abandon the series' historical design philosophy.
7.5 / 10
A hand-illustrated roguelike deckbuilder that swaps cards for dice — you don't collect relics so much as permanently rebuild the six faces of your own dice — landing close enough to Slay the Spire and Dicey Dungeons that its own reviewers keep naming both games unprompted.
7.5 / 10
