I’m as surprised as you are that Burden of Command is finally seeing the light of day. After spending so much time in development, expectations are high. So, what do I think about Burden of Command by playing this brief snippet of tutorials and scenarios?

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• It is an innovative title, I’ll give it that much. The idea of merging a turn-and-hex-based tactics wargame with leadership RPG elements is a very nice foundation to build a game.
• The tutorial is very in-depth, but it can be a bit overwhelming for newcomers. It goes over a lot of stuff at once.
• It operates on a multiple-phase per-turn system, which can be confusing at first but starts to make sense after a while. Each phase is led by an officer, controlling the squads under his command, when that officer and squads are out of moves, the phase ends and you hand control over to the enemy. This goes back and forth until you either don’t want to move any of your units, or you’re out of action in every officer.
• The system makes some sense, by making the enemy less static and keeping the gameplay cycles a lot shorter and more intense.
• From the looks of it, most battles will take place at relatively closer ranges, as the game forces you to use the 4Fs to find, fix, flank, and finish your enemies with a charge. It’s realistic.
• The leadership RPG aspect of it isn’t on full display in this demo, but what’s here is enough to lead me to believe we might have something special in our hands. I just want to see how consequential my actions are in the full campaign.
• In battles officers take the central stage, they’ll direct fire more effectively, rally demoralized units, bolster their spirits, and conduct artillery missions. Be ready to have them constantly shift between squads if you want to make the most of each one.
• There are a lot of options and not enough time to do everything perfectly, just like in war. Burden of Command isn’t afraid of making that abundantly clear from the get-go.
• There’s a lot of love put into the amount of well-written text, the colorized pictures of World War 2, and the videos of veterans are impeccably presented.

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All and all, I only see see Burden of Command being one of two things: either falling into obscurity due to the complexity of its mechanics. Or rising up to become an instant classic that pushed the wargaming genre forward in ways no other game attempted. I personally rooting for it to be the latter.

Most importantly, just by looking at the sheer amount of resources Burden of Command has, and how it’s attempting to realistically portray World War 2, every time I look at Burden of Command, it’s like looking at a video game version of an Antony Beevor book.