I have played my fair share of World War 2 video games. In fact, I think I have wargamed the Second World War more than any other time in History. From games like Medal of Honor: Allied Assault, Brothers in Arms, Company of Heroes, Combat Mission, War In The West, Men of War, Call to Arms, Codename: Panzers, Blitzkrieg, Frontline Command: World War 2, Sudden Strike, Hell Let Loose, Battlefield 1942 to countless others, I have played everything under the gaming sun, and yet, no game ever did what Burden of Command managed to do: making me care for my lovely Nickel Company, act like a true leader, and present me with a unique experience I cannot find in any other game. I’m glad to say that Burden of Command not only meets all expectations I placed upon it but far surpasses them. It is, in my eyes, one of the best World War 2 games ever made. Please sit back, and relax, because we will be here for a while.
- Genre: Roleplaying Game, Wargame & Turn-Based Strategy
- Developer: Green Tree Games LLC
- Publisher: Green Tree Games LLC
- Release Date: 8th April, 2025
- Price: $19.99/ 19,99€/ £19.99
- Buy at: Steam
- Reviewed On: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.70 GHz, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GTX 2080
I want to start this review by prefacing that I believe Burden of Command is a game best experience unspoiled, so I’ll avoid using too many screenshots, and the ones I’ll use are mostly from the start of the game, or screenshots available at the game’s Steam page.
“The enemy surrendered!” I hear a man crying amidst the chaos of battle. After a nightly fight to capture a well-defended enemy machine gun position, the men of Nickel Company get some respite: the mood begins to lighten, shoulders unclench, and the guys begin to light their cigarettes while picking whatever ammunition they can find along the beach. “Medic!” we hear the sergeant crying well and clear, piercing the ominous roar of distant artillery. The men rush and find a private, bleeding profusely from several gunshot wounds, yet alive, but not for long. Nickel Company has suffered its first casualty. The weight of your decisions begins to take a heavy toll on you. You think back and reconsider if you could have done better. The War had barely just begun.
After spending the last two and half weeks playing Burden of Command, whenever I sit down to write this review all I can think about is that first death, and how a game managed to make me care so much for a bunch of people who don’t really exist, but somehow, you feel responsible for them.
To be honest, was expecting a very different experience when Burden of Command was first announced, a long time ago. I kept on hearing how it was going to try and replicate the aspects of leadership into a game, and all that I imagined was a couple of hero units playing officers, giving units buffs in combat, while every other aspect we have grown used to see in hex-based wargames remained pretty much the same. I’m so glad to say that isn’t the case. Burden of Command is as much a roleplaying game as it is a turn-based tactics wargame.
As such, the game jumps around between two intertwining levels: the narrative one, presented with some tasteful and decently well-written texts (there’s a lot of reading) where you’ll be making most of the narrative choices, each with their consequences and branching story paths. The second level is turn-based tactical combat. Often, battles will be interrupted for you to make decisions mid-fight, or be presented with story bits. At first, this felt a bit annoying, but once you start looking at BoC as an RPG instead of a strategy game, this will grow on you and make you appreciate it just a bit more. However, I can imagine those of you looking for a pure tactical experience being put off by this. The game is all about the stories it’s trying to tell, and unapologeticly so. The narrative bits will go on for quite some time, and you’ll often spend 30 minutes or more reading and making narrative decisions before you set foot on the battlefield again. You’ll attend briefings, listen to conversations, talk with the locals, mingle with your guys, discuss tactics and the war with your officers, and everything else that comprises the “boring” aspects of war.
With the story being so heavily featured, who are you, exactly? Without spoiling the early bits of the game, I’ll put things this way: You’re the commanding officer of Nickel Company, a fictional company of the very real 7th Infantry Regiment. Also known as “The Cottonbalers”, they fought in North Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe during the Second World War 2. As commanding officer, you’re responsible for two things: achieving the objectives bestowed upon you by your chain of command, and your troopers. Here’s where one of the game’s more interesting twists comes in: two different victory conditions.
We’ve grown accustomed to having to achieve an objective, often this can be done at any cost with little to no repercussions. If the mission is successful, congrats, you move to the next mission and might, or not, carry your losses. If the mission fails, the campaign comes to a close or you need to give it another go. In Burden of Command, the victory conditions are twofold, and you can win either by completing the objectives or by keeping your guys alive. Remember that scene in Band of Brothers where Major Winters disobeys an order and refuses to send another incursion to the other side of the river, right at the tail end of the war, because it made little to no sense? In Burden of Command, you can do just that. Did things go south early on during your mission and achieving the mission goal is going to be too costly or downright impossible? Maybe it’s better to save your guys to fight another time. This isn’t inconsequential, and you’ll suffer penalties for failing, but those might be worth it, instead of losing a highly experienced group of soldiers. The story will continue moving forward, despite whatever you choose to do. That’s a fun twist. In my experience playing the game, absolute failure never happened, so I don’t know what happens if it does. Winning the mission objective nets you prestige, and taking care of your guys earns you trust. I’ll explain these a bit later.
Battles in Burden of Command might look like the average wargaming affair at the tactical level, but there are a couple of twists built into it that I think work great here (but would feel out of place for other games). Luke Hughes, the man behind BoC said in an interview with me at the Critical Moves Podcast that the game’s mechanics are built around the idea of leadership on the battlefield and the central role officers play when commanding their men. Each officer has three squads under their command, and these squads can only be ordered around by their officer, or the company’s captain. Activate a Lieutenant and during that phase, you can only move him and his units. Once you run out of orders or don’t feel like you need to use anymore at the moment, your opponent will do the same, and so on, until you either exhausted all your orders of all of your officers or don’t see the need to take any more actions during your turn. Activating an officer with 5 orders and expending only 2 during its phase before handing over control to the enemy to do its move doesn’t mean you lose those extra orders, but that you’ll be able to use them again later when you need to, by activating that officer again. A single turn can go on for quite a while, and last more than a dozen phases. It’s a neat and unique system that highlights the role of officers in a way that makes sense. These officers are also physical presences on the battlefield, and they’ll need to move between units for some of their actions to work. Yes. They can be killed too.
Your squads might work well on their own, but they’re a lot more effective if they have an officer directing them. For that to happen the officer needs to be in the same hex of the squad and personally help them. An officer present will help the men fire more accurately, will bolster their spirits and rally them if their morale falters (each one of these actions uses a valuable order). Expect them to be quite busy during combat, constantly hopping between units. Soldiers with no officers with them are also less likely to take risks and do things like move on open terrain and charge enemy positions.
The overall combat mechanics also work very well and have a basis in real tactics. To succeed you’ll need to apply the 4Fs of combat: Find the enemy, Fix them in place, move to Flank, and Finish them, either by killing, or forcing a surrender. In BoC long-distance firefights are unlikely to result in a lot of casualties, of any at all. As most memoires will let you know, once fired upon, soldiers will seek cover and hide, so continuously firing on them while they’re behind a wall isn’t going to result in them being killed (it might, but most of the time it won’t), but it will keep their heads down. Remember that some studies estimate that in World War 2 it took around 20,000 to 45,000 bullets to kill one soldier, and you’re not carrying enough ammunition to play against those odds, so you’ll need to keep the enemy’s heads down and charge their positions of you want to achieve victory. Prolongued firefights might be safer, but won’t help you win any battles. For this to work the game models squad morale and suppression levels. It’s very well-implemented and works great at this scale. This focus on realistic tactics also reinforces the role officers have when executing this kind of tactic, where an extra push might be needed to have your men feel encouraged enough to assault an enemy position. If you want to win in BoC, you must be aggressive.
Burden of Command has a bit of a steep learning curve, and I suspect that those not used to this kind of mechanics might dismiss the game as too complicated or hard to grasp at the beginning. Even I, quite trained in the ways of convoluted turn-based strategy games had some brain-twisting moments trying to piece together the way turns and phases work and how essential officers are. There’s a lengthy tutorial where Luke personally teaches you the basics of the game, and there’s a lengthy boot camp sequence hand-holding you across a lot of different situations. By the end, you should be able to grasp the basics but keep in mind that the learning curve is here, and some adaptation might be required before you can enjoy the game as the narrative experience it wants to be. I have put together a list of several tips to help new commanders out.
One thing I should mention is that alongside your infantry squads you’ll also have armoured support, heavy weapons such as mounted machineguns and mortars, as well as artillery. These work similarly to infantry, with officers leading them, but tanks have some mechanics of their own.
The combat itself isn’t the most in-depth affair, and the complexity of its battles pale in comparison to games like Combat Mission, Mius Front, and all those Wargame Design Studio’s titles, which focus a lot more on simulating almost every aspect of tactical combat, while Burden of Command is more focused on telling a story, and zooms its mechanics into it. So if you’re looking for that kind of game, Burden of Command isn’t it, and you might emerge a bit disappointed. Now, this isn’t to say that the tactical missions are devoid of challenge. Trust me, they’re not, and you’re always going to find yourself lacking enough men, enough firepower and enough orders to deal with the situations thrown at you. This also means that’s going to lack the replayability of those kinds of games, but I certainly hope that the team releases some mod tools later down the line, because I want to create a couple of my scenarios! Also, I would like to be able to play campaign missions outside of the campaign to experiment with other tactics and not have to replay the whole thing.
Remember when I mentioned how an experienced group of soldiers might be worth saving in the long run instead of fulfilling the mission? That’s because officers and squads have a meta progression of sorts, earning new traits, and stats and performing a lot better and more consistently under the duress of combat. They’re more likely to follow your orders, be plenty accurate when laying fire, and braver when charging enemy positions. Officers’ experience is, arguably, more valuable than that of their men: they have a better command and control of the battlefield, allowing them to take more actions every turn, a display of their expertise being leaders. Take care of them, because the last thing you want is to be in the Ardennes with a bunch of green lads.
Between missions and narrative experiences is where you’ll manage your company, by allocating prestige and trust points to reinforce squads and increase their experience.
Now, with a lot of praise being said so far for this role-playing aspect of the game, surely the mission design had to suffer as a result, right? Well, no. Not at all. Missions are based on actual real-life operations and battles, and range from small scuffles to large-scale affairs with plenty of units. Each battle is hand crafted and you can take several different approaches to victory. I know I am dancing around the subject here, but I really don’t want to spoil any of them, since a lot of the fun of the game is facing the reality that every battlefield is unknown to you aside from what you can directly see, and what little intel you have.
Last, but certainly not least, we have your character progression: as the game goes on, you’ll encounter special situations, and the way you react to them will dictate your leadership style. These can be a mix of several styles and might change during the war, as you might start as a cautious commander, and develop yourself into an aggressive one. These changes are not blind, and the game will let know what the result of your choice will be, so if you want to continue being aggressive because you like the perks it gives you, you can continue being so. I think the game’s a lot more fun when you don’t try and optimize what choices you make, but just go on with what you think you would do in that situation.
Presentation-wise Burden of Command has an amazing art style, with its hand-painted terrains, units and portraits that are always on display. It perfectly fits the intimate and tense theme of the game, bringing the characters and battlefields to life. Everything looks beautiful. Now, this isn’t to say that the game’s presentation is perfect, it isn’t. There are no animations for units when firing their weapons or taking hits-. There could have been different sprites and animations for when units are suppressed, helping players immediately identify their status. To be fair, it’s not like the game needs them, because it doesn’t, but it would be a nice touch that could elevate the game even further. The sound design during the battles isn’t stellar either, but again, it serves its purpose well enough, and I like the constant sound bytes presented on the dialogue screens.
The game’s UI is minimalistic in a good way, presenting the information needed on the main screen without cluttering it with too many icons. That’s to be expected because, despite its learning curve, Burden of Command isn’t a complicated game with a ton of numbers and units to keep track of. From a technical standpoint, I haven’t experienced any troubles, neither bugs nor performance issues. With the game being 2D and turn-based, I don’t really think this counts as an endorsement, but it’s worth noting.
One thing I would like to highlight before I wrap this one up, is the incredible attention to historical detail and the genuinely insane amount of man-hours that went into colourizing hundreds (maybe thousands?) of real pictures and writing thousands of historical descriptions and notes for those. Make no mistake when I say this, the game didn’t need to have all this, even black and white pictures could have done the job, so I have to highlight this as a major reason why I (and probably you) enjoyed the game a whole lot. Time and time again I discovered small bits and pieces of historical information I had no idea about. I can honestly tell you that I read every description the game has. In a world where most gaming companies don’t even bother creating manuals for their games, going to this length to bring gamers closer to history is just something I must applaud and give the team credit for. Some museums don’t put this much effort into their exhibitions, and all this was made possible due to the work of countless volunteers. If you like reading about historical details, you’ll have a blast examining every screen thrown at you.
Final Score: 10/10
Burden of Command is for World War 2 videogames what Saving Private Ryan and Brothers in Arms were to Hollywood in the late 90s and early 2000s: A reference in storytelling. It’s a unique, fascinating, intimate look at the experiences of the men who fought and died during World War 2 through the lenses of those who led them and saw- first-hand- and had to live with the consequences of their decisions. Burden of Command set out to be a leadership RPG and it absolutely nails it in every aspect, and a masterclass on how to create new mechanics and adapt them to the theme, story, and conflict you set your game in.
I know I have criticized Burden of Command here and there, so the 10/10 might look a bit out of place, but it isn’t, and it’s a game that I think deserves every bit of love it can get, not only because it’s such a unique experience in a period already explored by so many other titles, but because it’s a love letter to history, and treats it, and those involved, with the utmost respect. I’ve been a World War 2 aficionado since I was a kid, so my opinion might be biased, but if you are too, then it’s equally valid. Even if you have a passing interest in World War Two strategy games, you owe yourself to experience Burden of Command.
A thought crossed my mind when I was writing this final paragraph: Burden of Command has laid the foundations for something I would love to see turn into a series of games, and I can easily imagine a game from the German perspective, as they go from their victorious campaigns in Poland and France to the abhorrent campaign in Russian, and their last stand in Berlin. Or a Russian campaign that brings a much-needed human touch to a theatre of war and army that has mostly been treated as a numbers game. Why not a British one that begins in France, sees the desperate retreat at Dunkerque, the time in between preparing for the German invasion, and then preparing to go back to France again on D-Day. How awesome would that be?
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