Rise of Piracy
A dormant genre gets a fresh coat of paint Rise of Piracy is a solo-developed Early Access naval sim from IrishJohnGames, published by MicroProse Software, that casts players as a
6.5 / 10
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Strategy reviews
1335 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
Browse the reviews
1335 reviews
Road to Omaha: College Baseball Dynasty
A deep, text-and-menu college baseball GM sim built by a single active developer, earning real devotion from dynasty-management fans logging dozens to well over a hundred hours, while a recurring progression-blocking bug locked several dedicated players out of their saves entirely.
6.5 / 10
Rogue Circuit Review
A Racing Game Where the Deckbuilding Is the Point Rogue Circuit's pitch is an unusual one: it's a racing game where the actual racing is often something you delegate rather
6.5 / 10
R-Type Tactics I • II Cosmos
A long-awaited Western release for a beloved PSP tactics duology, rebuilt in Unreal Engine 5 — genuinely treasured by the fans who've waited seventeen years for it, and genuinely undercut for newcomers by aggressive upscaling artifacts and a control scheme that inherited its handheld-era clunkiness without ever being modernised.
6.5 / 10
Rutrum
A physics roguelike that fuses Suika-style gem-merging with deckbuilding, earning a unanimous but small early Positive reception for its satisfying merge chains and character variety, while reviewers are candid about confusing early mechanics, short repetitive runs, and difficulty that trivialises once the right item appears.
6.5 / 10
Sanctum 2
Coffee Stain Studios' co-op FPS/tower-defense hybrid sequel leans harder into shooting and character builds than its predecessor, drawing genuine praise for its variety and co-op chaos — while a consistent, well-corroborated wave of original-game fans argue the sequel traded away the freeform maze-building that made the first Sanctum distinctive in the first place.
6.5 / 10
Scratch Off!
A Balatro-inspired roguelike that swaps poker hands for scratch cards, building a deck of coins and modifiers to scratch your way past an ever-rising rent payment, praised for a genuinely addicting core loop once it clicks but held back by harsh early-run RNG and a thin content pool that several reviewers had already exhausted within a couple of hours.
6.5 / 10
Shadowrun: Hong Kong - Extended Edition
The third and final Harebrained Schemes Shadowrun tactical RPG, and the trilogy's most divisive entry — some players call it a masterpiece with a thousand-plus hours to back it up, others say the Matrix hacking minigame and murky pacing undo what Dragonfall got right.
6.5 / 10
Shadowrun Returns
The Kickstarter campaign that brought cyberpunk-meets-fantasy Shadowrun back to video games — a genuinely well-written tactical RPG that its own developer, and most of its fans, would go on to surpass twice over with the sequels it made possible.
6.5 / 10
Shadows of Forbidden Gods
A genuinely unprecedented solo-developer grand strategy game where you play a secretive evil god corrupting a living, Crusader Kings-style simulated fantasy world from the shadows — praised almost unanimously for a concept unlike anything else in the genre, undercut by consistently, harshly criticized UI and mechanical clarity problems that went largely unaddressed for years before a modest, deliberately cautious fix arrived.
6.5 / 10
Shambles: Sons of Apocalypse
EXLIX's ambitious fusion of choose-your-own-adventure storytelling, roguelite deckbuilding, and turn-based card combat delivers on its post-apocalyptic worldbuilding and branching narrative far more consistently than it delivers a fair, bug-free fight.
6.5 / 10
Shieldwall
A third-person ancient-warfare squad battle sim casting you as a Roman commander leading testudo formations and javelin volleys across historical campaigns — genuinely fun in short bursts, but held back by a lopsided unit cap, no campaign save system, and a post-launch update cadence that slowed to a crawl after leaving Early Access.
6.5 / 10
Ship, Inc.
A cozy package-packing sim from the makers of Lost but Found, charming enough to hook players for the first several hours before a well-corroborated slice of its Very Positive review pool ran into item-physics bugs and a hollow, reward-free endgame.
6.5 / 10
ShoreTiles
A genuinely excellent, Dorfromantik-inspired daytime tile-placement builder wrapped around a Lovecraftian night-time tower-defense mode reviewers consistently describe as rough, unbalanced and unwieldy by comparison, redeemed somewhat by an actively responsive developer already patching based on player feedback.
6.5 / 10
Slipways
A minimalist, marketed-as-strategy space-empire puzzle game about linking planets into supply chains, Very Positive across 1,805 reviews for its charming presentation and satisfying core loop — undercut by an extremely consistent complaint that its randomly generated maps can make individual runs unwinnable regardless of skill, and a well-corroborated complaint that its single core mechanic runs out of depth within 10 to 15 hours.
6.5 / 10
Slots & Diapers
An incremental game about elderly gamblers who soil themselves for coin drops, using genuinely dark subject matter as fuel for a tight, addictive clicker loop with a surprising story underneath the gross-out premise.
6.5 / 10
Smash it Wild: Tactical Volleyball Roguelike
A genuinely novel tactical-roguelike hybrid of volleyball and dodgeball from Goblinz Studio, whose confirmed weakness — most players see everything the game offers within 10-12 hours — is the same complaint from its warmest fans and its refund requests alike.
6.5 / 10
Snakecremental
A NZ$5.99 solo-developer hybrid that bolts a proper node-based skill tree onto Snake, making the run itself the resource loop rather than the thing an idle game politely ignores — checked against a 433-review corpus that agrees almost unanimously on where the game turns from clever to punishing.
6.5 / 10
Sniper Elite 3
Rebellion's North Africa-set stealth-sniper sequel refines its predecessor's ballistics, X-ray kill cam and larger, more open level design — praised by longtime series fans as the franchise's high point, but weighed down by one of the most heavily upvoted day-one DLC backlashes in this entire lane's review sample.
6.5 / 10
Solasta II
Tactical Adventures' sequel moves to Unreal Engine 5 and the newly revised SRD 5.2 ruleset, and its Early Access build proves the tactics still work — while making clear that a buyer today is paying full price for roughly ten hours of a much longer game still being built.
6.5 / 10
Sorcerer's Servant
A genuinely novel slot-machine roguelike deckbuilder that turns matching four adjacent symbols into gear upgrades, praised by its small but dedicated audience for a soundtrack and central hook unlike anything else in the genre, held back by heavy RNG reliance and real interface friction the developer is still actively patching.
6.5 / 10
Soulreign Review
A Solo-Developed Soul Collector in the Backpack Battles Lineage Soulreign entered Early Access on August 1, 2026, and graduated to a full 1.0 release less than a month later on Aug
6.5 / 10
SpellForce 3
A fantasy RTS/RPG hybrid that launched genuinely buggy and unbalanced in 2017, briefly carried a real, documented tracking-software controversy, and was rebuilt into a noticeably better game by a free 2020 overhaul most reviewers now treat as the definitive way to play it.
6.5 / 10
Starforged Legacy
A bullet-heaven space shoot-'em-up roguelite that nails its short, arcade-tight core loop and build variety, but is held back in its early Early Access state by rigid mandatory time limits and controller UI bugs that several reviewers say actively fight the fun.
6.5 / 10