2009 – Men of War
The year where the gaming-brown aesthetic became the norm: Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Left 4 Dead 2, and League of Legends all came out in 2009. A lot of people might be expecting Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, but I think Men of War is the better title. It was an innovate real-time strategy that brought a level of detail I had never experienced before. Each soldier had it’s own inventory. Vehicles had armour penetration values and modular damage instead of health bars, soldiers would die in one hit, and the campaign was a massive affair spanning both Allied, Soviet and German missions, all across the Eastern and Western Fronts. The game went on to span a series that’s still alive today in the form of Gates of Hell and Men of War II.
2010 – Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty
The entry of the 2010s was filled with instant classics, as Mass Effect 2, Read Dead Redemption, Metro 2033, and Fallout: New Vegas all rushed to the market. It was also the year when gaming and YouTube went mainstream with Amnesia: The Dark Descent, popularizing a lot of the platform’s big names of today. But the year also saw the release of what is, arguably, the most famous real-time strategy (and strategy as a whole) title with Starcraft II. Improving on every aspect of the original, Starcraft II set up a new standard: the asymmetrical yet balanced multiplayer, the massive story-driven campaign, the tightness of the control and unit movement, and the unit design. Starcraft II came out at a time when Blizzard was known not for its soulless cashgrabs, but for being a company that prided itself on picking up a formula and polishing it to near perfection. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.
2011 – Total War: Shogun 2
If this wasn’t a list of the best Strategy games of all time, then the winning game of 2011 would be Dark Souls. This was an especially bleak year for strategy titles: Anno 2070, Stronghold 3, Age of Empires Online, Sengoku, and a couple of other, bad games. There were just two titles that could apply for this accolade, and those would be Total War: Shogun 2, arguably, the best Total War game ever made, or Men of War: Assault Squad. Set in feudal Japan, Shogun 2 is the peak of the series, and it has been downhill ever since(well, maybe except for Warhammer). Assault Squad was just more of the same but with little to no single-player, so I never enjoyed it as much as its predecessors.
2012 – XCOM: Enemy Unknown
The world was supposed to come to an end in 2012, fortunately, the worst thing we got was the ending of Mass Effect 3 and the terrible release of Diablo 3. I will forever argue that it was XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and XCOM: Enemy Unknown alone that breathed new life into the turn-based strategy genre, and from here on out we have been spoiled by countless other games. In a time when MOBAs were all the rage, with League and Dota dominating the charts. This was the time when Twitch started to become popular and even more niche genres started to go mainstream. Enter XCOM: Enemy Unknown, a total remake and reimagining of the original XCOM: UFO Defense. As soon as the game hit both physical and digital shelves gamers everywhere fell in love with it. The massive campaign, the menacing aliens, the punishing difficulty, the deep turn-based combat, the squad personalization, and management all came together to create a memorable experience of what is, essentially, one, if not the best strategy game ever put to code.
2013 – Europa Universalis IV
Three things from 2013 are still very much alive to this day: GTA V, Arma 3, and Europa Universalis IV. Complain all you want about the monetization schemes of Paradox Interactive, and I would wholeheartedly agree with you on pretty much everything, but there’s no denying that Europa Universalis IV isn’t just another grand-strategy game. It is, in fact, the grand strategy game that all other titles should be taking notes from. Set at the tail-end of the medieval period and lasting for over 4 centuries, Europa Universalis’s time-frame is perfect for people looking to explore, expand, and build massive empires. It was the time in history when new empires sprung and old ones fell, the nation-state became a thing, and the European naval expansion “brought new worlds to the world”, to quote the famous Portuguese poet, Luís de Camões.
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