Read our full Homeworld Remastered review. An adaptation of the classic tabletop game, it offers an astonishing level of depth to its giant stompy robot suits. The campaign too is deep and complex, as you struggle to get new gear for your mechs whilst constantly risking damage or destruction in missions. Read our full Battletech review. Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
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Today, we have 9 million users a month around the world, and assess more than 1, products a year. In this article… 1. Into the Breach 2. Company of Heroes 3. Stellaris 4. Civilization 6 5. Total War Warhammer 2 6. Starcraft II Legacy of the Void 7. Cities Skylines 8. Darkest Dungeon 9. If you liked the Battlestar Galactica reboot, or just fancy a good yarn in your RTS, you should play this. Thanks to the Homeworld Remastered Collection , it's aged very well.
The remasters maintain Homeworld and its sequel's incredible atmosphere, along with all the other great bits, but with updated art, textures, audio, UI—the lot. Everything is in keeping with the spirit of the original, but it just looks and sounds better. The different factions are so distinct, and have more personality than they did in the original game—hence Soviet squids and Allied dolphins.
They found the right tonal balance between self-awareness and sincerity in the cutscenes, as well—they're played for laughs, but still entertain and engage. Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak sounded almost sacrilegious at first. Over a decade since the last Homeworld game, it was going to take a game remembered for its spaceships and 3D movement and turn it into a ground-based RTS with tanks? And it was a prequel? Yet in spite of all the ways this could have gone horribly wrong, Deserts of Kharak succeeds on almost every count.
It's not only a terrific RTS that sets itself apart from the rest of the genre's recent games, but it's also an excellent Homeworld game that reinvents the series while also recapturing its magic.
Only Total War can compete with the scale of Supreme Commander 's real-time battles. In addition to being the preeminent competitive strategy game of the last decade, StarCraft 2 deserves credit for rethinking how a traditional RTS campaign is structured. Heart of the Swarm is a good example of this, but the human-centric Wings of Liberty instalment is the place to start: an inventive adventure that mixes up the familiar formula at every stage.
In , Blizzard finally decided to wind down development on StarCraft 2 , announcing that no new additions would be coming, aside from things like balance fixes. The competitive scene is still very much alive, however, and you'll still find few singleplayer campaigns as good as these ones. Most notable today for being the point of origin for the entire MOBA genre, Warcraft III is also an inventive, ambitious strategy game in its own right, which took the genre beyond anonymous little sprites and into the realm of cinematic fantasy.
The pioneering inclusion of RPG elements in the form of heroes and neutral monsters adds a degree of unitspecific depth not present in its sci-fi stablemate, and the sprawling campaign delivers a fantasy story that—if not quite novel—is thorough and exciting in its execution. Shame about Warcraft 3: Reforged , it's not-so-great remake. Some games would try to step away from the emotional aspect of a war that happened in living memory. Not Company of Heroes. Age of Empires gave us the chance to encompass centuries of military progress in half-hour battles, but Rise of Nations does it better, and smartly introduces elements from turn-based strategy games like Civ.
When borders collide civs race through the ages and try to out-tech each other in a hidden war for influence, all while trying to deliver a knockout military blow with javelins and jets. It was tempting to put the excellent first Dawn of War on the list, but the box-select, right-click to kill formula is well represented. In combat you micromanage these empowered special forces, timing the flying attack of your Assault Marines and the sniping power of your Scouts with efficient heavy machine gun cover to undo the Ork hordes.
The co-operative Last Stand mode is also immense. If you need a 40K fix, we've also ranked every Warhammer 40, game. Like an adaptation of the tabletop game crossed with the XCOM design template, BattleTech is a deep and complex turn-based game with an impressive campaign system. You control a group of mercenaries, trying to keep the books balanced and upgrading your suite of mechwarriors and battlemechs in the game's strategy layer.
In battle, you target specific parts of enemy mechs, taking into account armor, angle, speed and the surrounding environment, then make difficult choices when the fight isn't going your way. It can initially be overwhelming and it's undeniably a dense game, but if that's what you want from your strategy games or you love this universe, it's a great pick.
A beautifully designed, near-perfect slice of tactical mech action from the creators of FTL. Into the Breach challenges you to fend off waves of Vek monsters on eight-by-eight grids populated by tower blocks and a variety of sub objectives.
Obviously you want to wipe out the Vek using mech-punches and artillery strikes, but much of the game is about using the impact of your blows to push enemies around the map and divert their attacks away from your precious buildings. Civilian buildings provide power, which serves as a health bar for your campaign. Every time a civilian building takes a hit, you're a step closer to losing the war. Once your power is depleted your team travels back through time to try and save the world again.
It's challenging, bite-sized, and dynamic. As you unlock new types of mechs and mech upgrades you gain inventive new ways to toy with your enemies. The game cleverly uses scarcity of opportunity to force you into difficult dilemmas. At any one time you might have only six possible scan sites, while combat encounters are largely meted out by the game, but what you choose to do with this narrow range of options matters enormously. You need to recruit new rookies; you need an engineer to build a comms facility that will let you contact more territories; you need alien alloys to upgrade your weapons.
You can probably only have one. In Sid Meier described games as "a series of interesting decisions. The War of the Chosen expansion brings even more welcome if frantic changes, like the endlessly chatty titular enemies, memorable nemeses who pop up at different intervals during the campaign with random strengths and weaknesses. Sneaky tactics doesn't come in a slicker package than Invisible Inc.
It's a sexy cyberpunk espionage romp blessed with so much tension that you'll be sweating buckets as you slink through corporate strongholds and try very hard to not get caught. It's tricky, sometimes dauntingly so, but there's a chance you can fix your terrible mistakes by rewinding time, adding some welcome accessibility to the proceedings.
First, you manage stockpiles, and position missile sites, nuclear submarines and countermeasures in preparation for armageddon. This organisation phase is an interesting strategic challenge in itself, but DEFCON is at its most effective when the missiles fly. Blooming blast sites are matched with casualty numbers as city after city experiences obliteration. Once the dust has settled, victory is a mere technicality. Unity of Command was already the perfect entry point into the complex world of wargames, but Unity of Command 2 manages to maintain this while throwing in a host of new features.
It's a tactical puzzle, but a reactive one where you have the freedom to try lots of different solutions to its military conundrums. Not just a great place to start, it's simply a brilliant wargame. Hearts of Iron 4 is a grand strategy wargame hybrid, as comfortable with logistics and precise battle plans as it is with diplomacy and sandboxy weirdness. Ostensibly game about World War 2, it lets you throw out history as soon as you want.
Want to conquer the world as a communist UK? Go for it. Maybe Germany will be knocked out of the war early, leaving Italy to run things. You can even keep things going for as long as you want, leading to a WW2 that continues into the '50s or '60s. With expansions, it's fleshed out naval battles, espionage and other features so you have control over nearly every aspect of the war. Normandy 44 takes the action back to World War 2 and tears France apart with its gargantuan battles.
It's got explosive real-time fights, but with mind-boggling scale and additional complexities ranging from suppression mechanics to morale and shock tactics. The sequel, Steel Division 2 , brings with it some improvements, but unfortunately the singleplayer experience isn't really up to snuff.
In multiplayer, though, it's pretty great. Each time a card is flipped over, your brain goes through a lightning-quick process of identifying the new symbol, cross-checking that against what you know is on your card, quickly reading the category of the other card, accessing your memory to try and find a good example, and then finally shouting it out before the other player does the same. This processing challenge under intense time pressure has a way of short-circuiting your brain, and it makes the game equally frustrating and engaging.
Why we love it: Betrayal at House on the Hill is what would happen if H. Lovecraft wrote a Scooby-Doo episode and turned it into a party game. Each player is assigned a character with different traits, including sanity, knowledge, might, and speed. As they explore a spooky mansion, they collect items and experience wacky, atmospheric events, from running into spiders to playing games with a creepy child who gets aggressive with his toys.
The strategy in Betrayal at House on the Hill is minimal, but the camp factor is high, so players can get goofy. In the rooms, players may acquire an event, item, or omen card. The players read the cards out loud—silly voices encouraged, in the spirit of telling a ghost story while holding a flashlight under your face and sitting around a campfire. For event cards, players may face a dice-rolling challenge based on their traits.
Players can also acquire magical items around the house to help them later on, but discovering omen cards has a chance of triggering the second phase of the game. In the second phase, called the Haunt, one player turns traitor and is assigned one of more than unique scenarios. The traitor faces off against the remaining players in a dramatic final battle, until one side emerges victorious.
Mysterium requires you to find the subtle connections between cards and to consider how each person is most likely to read them. The remaining players are psychics who must solve the murder case using the vision cards to pick out the correct person, place, and thing cards—to advance, each psychic must solve a different facet of the case. A common color, shape, or theme might be the only connection between a set of vision cards and a person card. The psychics bet on who they think placed a correct guess each round, and whoever wins the most bets has the greatest advantage during the final round.
In the last round, the ghost gives the psychics one final vision, and any psychic who guesses correctly wins. Why we love it: Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 is an amazing step up for people who love classic Pandemic but want more of both a plot and a challenge.
Every session adds new elements. But then things … change. As you play more games in the season, the viruses mutate, rules change, cities rise and fall, and new character options and abilities and penalties come into play. Each session is different from the one before because game modifications are permanent and carry over between sessions. The continuous gameplay creates the feeling of a coherent, evolving story, and we were always curious and terrified to find out what would happen next.
Player count: one to four Duration: two to three hours more or less, depending how you play Rules: website Ages: 14 and up. Each has special skills that benefit different styles of play. The goal of the game is to gain Fame points, which you can earn in a variety of ways: collecting bounties, delivering illegal cargo, and more.
As you make money from these jobs, you can upgrade your gear and even replace your starter ship with the famous Millennium Falcon, Slave I , and others. During each turn, a player can choose to move their ship between planets, purchase upgrades, and then do jobs, collect bounties, and so on. Although the game can run long in its standard first-topoints mode especially with four players , we found that it can be equally fun with a set time limit. In that case, the winner is the person with the most Fame points when time expires.
Why we love it: The Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective series somehow generates the expansive, open-world feeling of video games like Breath of the Wild and Red Dead Redemption out of a small collection of paper materials and raw imagination.
In other words, if you like this game, you may want to consider trying out one of those, too. A deduction game at its core, Consulting Detective is an irresistible puzzle for mystery fans of all stripes—and one that will challenge even the most seasoned gumshoes. There are tons of potential sources, clues, and leads that you can review, following the threads of the case in a satisfyingly organic way to reach your own conclusions.
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