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163 Strategy games reviewed and scored, best first.
163 reviews
A tense, punishing tactical shooter with genuinely excellent gunplay, now navigating the real aftermath of its developer's confirmed 2023 layoffs and subsequent ownership changes — a corporate instability story its own players have watched unfold in real time.
6.5 / 10
A macro-focused RTS where you claw territory back from a robot horde that already owns the whole map, spend every watt of power on a rolling trade-off between economy, defence and offence, and push toward a 16-mission campaign the developer rates at 25-plus hours on Hard. Released 6 August 2026 with zero user reviews yet and a demo that's been public since March.
6.5 / 10
A competent, familiar entry in a fifteen-year-old tower defense franchise that still lands well with newcomers, while a genuine and specific chorus of long-time fans call it the weakest Kingdom Rush yet — too short at full price, too reliant on paid campaign DLC, and too close to a decade of prior instalments to feel like real evolution.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developer, first-person turn-based deckbuilding roguelike that launched into Early Access on 6 August 2026 with three classes, over 100 relics and a ten-tier ascension ladder already in place — reviewed the following day, with zero user reviews yet to check the pitch against and achievement stats that resolve to roughly two reporting accounts.
6.5 / 10
A free island-hopping colony builder that files itself under "incremental" and then asks for more clicking per minute than most strategy games — good ideas, fought hard by its own interruptions.
6.5 / 10
The best-designed digital card game in years, attached to an acquisition economy where the complaint isn't that you can pay to win — it's that you can't reliably pay to get the card you want at all.
6.5 / 10
A roguelite that turns inventory management from a chore between fights into the fight itself — and a look at whether a design built entirely around loot-shuffling has held up through more than a year of patches that keep rewriting its own rules.
6.5 / 10
A faithful digital adaptation of GMT Games' presidency board game, which means two things its Steam audience keeps discovering the hard way: the outcomes are decided by dice, and every year of your term ends in a quarter of an hour of pop-ups.
6.5 / 10
An XCOM-style Viking tactics RPG with genuinely praised writing that launched in a technical state its own reviewers compared to Early Access — and has spent the months since visibly recovering as negative-review volume collapsed following a string of patches.
6.5 / 10
A tense, tactically excellent SWAT shooter whose lifetime score is still recovering from a massive, well-documented 2025 review-bomb after the developer retroactively censored the PC version to match a new console release — recent sentiment suggests the wound is healing, but slowly.
6.5 / 10
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
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
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
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
A free browser incremental built by two developers since 2019, stacking Prestige into Transcension into Reincarnation into Ascension into Singularity — more reset layers than almost anything in the genre, though not every one of them changes what the layer below it means.
6.5 / 10
A digital adaptation of a real tabletop primer used by Fight Club International's professional military wargaming network — a 20-minute hex-and-counter hill assault built to teach the genre's core mechanics, shipped day one with zero user reviews and no achievement data to check its claims against.
6.5 / 10
The trilogy-capping mega-campaign Total War fans waited years for finally arrived and is genuinely excellent — after a rough launch, an expensive DLC structure, and a 2023 forum moderation policy that told players criticism was "a privilege" rather than a right.
6.5 / 10
A grand-strategy game brave enough to be about economics instead of conquest, four years and seventeen DLC later still arguing with its own players about warfare — and its newest expansion needed nine hotfixes in two months.
6.5 / 10
A dark fantasy strategy RPG that flips Darkest Dungeon's premise — you're the cult building up to destroy the hamlet, not the party defending it — wrapped in some of the most striking art in the genre and undercut by a tutorial that still can't explain its own systems more than a year after launch.
6.5 / 10
A frozen-apocalypse city-builder that plays fair for the first month and then quietly hands the server to whoever's alliance has the deepest wallets — the honest question isn't whether it's generous early on, it's where that generosity actually stops.
6.5 / 10
A solo-developed hybrid that welds grand-strategy nation management onto clicker mechanics — genuinely novel in concept, but a divisive combat rework, opaque economy and buggy pathfinding have left its Early Access reception stuck at Mixed.
6 / 10
A perfectly decent Anno wrapped in one of the least generous packages of 2025 — a NZ$99.95 base game, a Year 1 Pass that doesn't cover all of year one's DLC, Denuvo, a required Ubisoft account, and a disclosed use of AI tools for in-game assets.
6 / 10
Colossal Order's sequel to the beloved city-builder launched into one of the genre's most severe, well-documented disasters — severe performance failures, a "fake" simulation several reviewers describe finding through direct testing, and a real CEO controversy over blaming the community for backlash. This review can confirm, via the developer's own communications, that Colossal Order and publisher Paradox split entirely in November 2025, with a new studio, Iceflake Studios, now credited by a real, growing share of reviewers with a genuine turnaround since taking over development in 2026.
6 / 10
The raid loop it invented is still the best in the genre, and the company around it is the problem. NZ$85.99 to buy, another NZ$51.99 if you want the PvE mode, and a Steam launch so broken that 58 of the most-upvoted negative reviews were written in a single month.
6 / 10
