15 – Call to Arms – Gates of Hell: Ostfront
You would be hard-pressed to find a World War 2 strategy game with great graphics nowadays, but Call to Arms – Gates of Hell: Ostfront delivers some of the most authentically gritty visuals in the strategy genre, offering hyper-detailed World War II environments. These environments are filled with destructible vehicles, high-resolution textures for every unit and weapon system, lush vegetation, and realistic weather effects on snow maps. The authenticity of every single player mission makes it an excellent experience all around. Every explosion kicks up debris, every tank shell leaves visible impact damage, and every skirmish unfolds with the cinematic intensity of a Band of Brothers or Saving Private Ryan. Its commitment to historical accuracy and environmental fidelity creates a level of immersion rarely matched in RTS gaming, making it one of the best-looking wartime strategy titles ever made.
14 – Unity of Command 2
Unity of Command 2 is a very special entry. It’s not a photorealistic title; it doesn’t chase high texture quality or true-to-life lighting, nor does it even attempt to do something graphically impressive. Instead, this wargame chose a bold, stylized approach, giving it a uniquely elegant visual identity. Its map looks like a beautifully crafted war-room diorama, complete with layered terrain, painterly textures, and crisply highlighted unit icons that make even large operations easy to parse at a glance. Very subtle animations whenever a unit is interacted with, and a simple-to-use UI make it one of the best wargames to play in 2025, and one of the best and most accessible wargames of all time.
13 – Starship Troopers: Terran Command
Starship Troopers is a series that has a very well-defined aesthetic: an industrialized, authoritarian, imperialist look with plenty of satire. It’s not an easy job to emulate, but Slitherine’s RTS Starship Troopers: Terran Command managed to pull it off perfectly by staying faithful to the 1997 movie. This makes it a standout strategy game thanks to its chaotic, screen-filling battles where waves of perfectly animated Arachnids collide with the recognizable and beloved soldiers of the Mobile Infantry. The game’s clean desert, industrial, and cave environments, the satisfying muzzle-flash effects, and splashing of bug meat and gore make every engagement feel intense and readable, while the detailed unit animations and distinctive bug designs bring the classic film’s aesthetic to life in a modern RTS format. It’s a game that thrives on spectacle, delivering large-scale sci-fi warfare with impressive clarity and a polished artistic identity.
12 – XCOM 2
I recently wrote a massive retrospective and review about XCOM: Enemy Unknown and touched on this specific point about graphical fidelity, describing it as a game with a “very unique art style.” The “GI-Joe” x “Gears of War” x “Comic Book” look of the characters’ style made the game instantly recognizable and easy to read at a glance, with the oversized proportions of the characters and their weapons, and I praised its obvious B-Movie inspirations. XCOM 2 does the exact same, but improves on the game’s fidelity, bringing a new level of detail to the soldiers, enemies, and environments, expertly rebuilding a world now under alien control. The slices of the occupied world you see are dystopian, nearly cyberpunk-ish, cityscapes.
11 – Europa Universalis 5
I never thought I would ever put a grand strategy game on a list of the best-looking strategy games, but here we are. The recently released Europa Universalis 5 elevates Paradox’s hallmark grand strategy formula with its most visually impressive world map to date, presenting continents with richer terrain shading, detailed coastlines, dynamic weather, and a lot of close-up details and animations on cities and armies. This makes Europa Universalis 5 come truly alive, much more so than any other grand strategy game to date, making the rise and fall of empires feel more tangible than ever. Armies and navies are rendered with a greater variety of units, now respecting each culture and army at the time, and if you zoom in, it’s possible to see bustling cities, roads, forests, rivers, and nuanced regional differences that help the world feel truly alive. Lovely! It’s one of my favorite games of the year so far and one of the best grand strategy games you can play in 2025.
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