Master of Command Review – A Fun Strategy Game With a Roguelike Twist To Shake Up The Formula
It’s very often that I joke around with the idea that the secret to a happy life is having extremely low expectations, as one will seldom come out of something disappointed. I went to play Master of Command with no expectations whatsoever. The setting is far from being my favorite. I wasn’t particularly fond of the roguelike-ish elements of the game when the game was announced (despite being a huge fan of roguelike games), and the game’s presentation just wasn’t cutting it for me. Well, color me surprised when, the first time I boot up the game, and started playing, 4 hours had elapsed, and I was nearing the end of my first campaign. Suffice to say, Master of Command is a mix of roguelike elements, and 18th-century warfare is weirdly addictive, and I’ve been having a blast for the past week.
- Genre: Real-Time Strategy | Real-Time Tactics | Grand-Strategy | Roguelike
- Developer: Armchair Interactive
- Publisher: Armchair Interactive
- Price: $26.99 | 26,99€ | £22.49
- Release Date: 27 October, 2025
- Reviewer: Nuno Marques (PC)
- Target Audience: Real-Time Strategy players, history buffs, and Total War fans.
- Final Score: 7.5/10
Master of Command is a roguelike (I’ll explain), real-time strategy game set during the 18th century, where players take control of one of five nations (France, Prussia, Russia, England, and Austria), embark on a randomly generated single-player campaign. Let’s get this out of the way: Master of Command is not attempting to be a realistic portrayal of warfare. Instead, it’s gone down the route which I think is the best: it’s trying to be a fun video game first.
So, let’s start with this whole roguelike-ish thing! Campaigns in Master of Command are not set in stone (except for the 4 mission one, but more on that later). Every time you want to start a new campaign, you’re prompted to choose one of the aforementioned 5 nations, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and then you’re prompted to select one of three major strategic objectives. Each of these has two operational objectives, and by completing one or both, players will receive some rewards. The randomly generated campaign culminates in a sort of boss fight against the major army of the area.
There’s one thing I love, which is that you have a lot of difficulty options available- now, given, these are all modifiers- meaning that if you just want to have a more relaxed experience the first couple of times around, trying out a nation or new army compositions, you can, and don’t have to go full try-hard mode.
After spawning into the campaign map, you’ll be wandering around fighting smaller armies, securing objectives, investigating interest points, gathering resources, all in an effort to build up enough of a strong army for the final face-off. Each of these campaigns will have you play around 10 to 20 real-time strategy battles, all of different sizes: from small scuffles of 2000 men on each side, to more than 10000 by the end of the campaign. These campaigns have a characteristic that, as I grew older, came to enjoy and love more and more in games, which is that they’re not massive, multi-week (in real-life time) affairs, similar to something like Total War. Instead, they go by relatively fast, and if you play extremely focused, and with the 3x speed turned on during the campaign and battles, I think you can be done with one campaign in just a couple of hours.
While the randomly generated campaigns are an awesome way of keeping things interesting in varied ways, the best part of Master of Command truly lies with its real-time strategy battles. A fun mix between the more arcade Total War battles and the authenticity of Ultimate General: Civil War, the RTS element of Master of Command is solid, fun, and can pack a substantial amount of depth, with each unit having its specific stats for numbers, attack, movement, accuracy, morale, and more. Add to that customization made possible by changing their equipment, upgrades, and the ability to furnish them with item drops that change their stats, and there’s a lot one can play around here.
Being set in a time when the musket was king, I don’t think I need to explain to you that most of the battles will be fought in lines of men firing at each other, with artillery support wreaking havoc on the ranks, while cavalry attempts to catch the infantry or artillery off-guard for a flanking maneuver. Battles are easy to control, can be paused, and orders can be issued via mouse and keyboard shortcuts. There’s line of sight, cover, and altitude to take into account when positioning your units, and all have an impact on the results of a gunfire exchange. It’s easy to see if your units are under any of those effects via UI, too, which is always great. The game is very easy to read, and despite the large number of units on screen, battles take place in relatively small maps, which might not be the most exciting of prospects for some of you, but given the game arcade nature, I think it works well enough, even if, in some battles, extending your lines to max means that you can almost draw an entire line of units from one side to the next. Funny? Yes. Useful? No.
What matters is that I had my fun with the game’s battles, and they’re the highlight here, but battles are not perfect. As for performance, I don’t have a way to test how the game will play on weaker systems, but at the moment, the game (or my machine) seems to struggle a bit with bigger battles, with stutters being the norm. The nature of the game, being line battles, requires the capability of moving the lines en masse forward and backwards, without having to click and drag, so something like Napoleon: Total War, where you can click directional arrows on the UI to move your massive lines, could be implemented here.
Enemy AI can be found lacking sometimes, as they don’t seem they understand the concept of defense. Even if you’re the one initiating the battle, they won’t hesitate to wait for you, but go forward every time to meet you in battle. This allows the player to always play defensively, and arguably, gives them the better positioning if they know how to take advantage of cover and altitude in terrain, making battles a little less challenging than they should be. In on extreme example of AI making a terrible judgement, in a battle where I was outnumbered I ordered my cavalry units, one to the left side of the map, the other to the right, and the AI instead of taking advantage of this to crush my infantry decided to take two infantry units and mindlessly chase my cavalry all the way to their spawn point.
After each battle, you’re rewarded with resources and items. These resources are gold, supplies, reserves, and ammunition, and their usage is very explicit. Gold, however, has the most usage, and with it you can buy new units, equipment, and items, hire officers, and buy all other types of supplies. You can also sell the items you receive after a battle for more gold, or just equip them to each of your unit’s available slots. If you’re not impressed by this system, I just want you to know that you can equip a Brown Bear and a Dachshund as mascots. This, in theory, could make Master of Command a 10 out of 10 game, but I need to start deducting points, because this inventory system really needs a comparison tool for equipment, so that players don’t have to constantly mouse over the weapon equipped, and the several ones they might have in their inventory.
The camp is where you manage your army. You can have up to five brigades in total, each of which can have four units commanded by an officer. After every battle, every unit and its officers gain veterancy, opening up a tree of upgrades and progression. Officers gain new traits, and while most of these are somewhat passive improvements to stats, some of which can be extremely valuable, such as the fire-by-rank. A nice touch is also the fact that you can customize each individual unit flag and uniform. This camping system, paired up with the random campaigns and item drops, is pretty damn awesome, while being extremely simple to experiment with.
Before we jump into the game’s presentation, I want to recognize that there’s a 4-mission campaign available, but in all honesty, I doubt that’s going to be a selling point for anyone. I’m not going to pretend to know if they are based in reality or not, but aside from the cutscenes, there’s nothing interesting there, just 4 battles stitched together. If you play the game at 3 times speed, you could be done with them in just a couple of hours. Maybe less.
Presentation wise, and this is going to be extremely personal, so your outlook on this might be quite different from mine, but I think the game has an excellent presentation in the menu, the user interface elements, and the grand-campaign map (most of all, because it’s essentially the iconic Armchair Historian artstyle applied to everything, which is great), but flunks a bit on the real-time strategy battles, but not to point where it is the worst thing imaginable, just because it makes the whole experience a bit less enjoyable for me.
The maps are somewhat generic, with assets repeating themselves quite often, and after playing several battles in a row, they end up feeling way too similar. From the battles I have played, I don’t think the maps are randomly generated, because I’m pretty sure I have played on a map with a river on the left side more than once. Units are not very detailed either, animations are okay, but they are too blocky, a prevalent artstyle choice that has been permeating way too many games. With the amount of beautiful uniforms from this era, I would rather have more detail in this department. Fortunately, most of the time you’ll probably be playing the game at a high enough level of zoom where those flaws will go unnoticed. At least, this simplicity in assets and unit design means that the real-time strategy battles are very easy to read at a glance, and almost all the information you need is immediately visible and available.
Sound and music-wise, there’s really nothing to write home about or criticize; the sound assets do their job well enough, and the music is not memorable, but not bad either.
Final Verdict and Score
7.5/10
To round things up, I would like to finish this review on two positive notes, the first one being replayability. If you’re looking for a game that’s going to give you a lot of content, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed in Master of Command with its mix of grand strategy map, roguelike elements, and fun real-time strategy battles. And last, but not least, I also think that the game has a solid foundation for future DLCs, and I hope to see some new nations arrive next, especially my very own, Portugal!
Game Score Breakdown
- Core Gameplay & Mechanics: 8/10
- Content: 8/10
- Graphics & Artstyle: 7/10
- Sound & Music: 6/10
- Technical Performance: 5/10
- Replayability & Value: 8/10
- Monetization & Business Mode: 9/10
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