8 – Company of Heroes

Company of Heroes is, by far, the most iconic real-time strategy game, set in World War 2, of all time. This game changed the genre forever and breathed new life into what was, at the time, a very stale World War 2 strategy scene. Introducing a dynamic cover for your units, destructive battlefields, a perfect blend of Hollywood-like action and aesthetics with a gameplay that felt very authentic and grounded (other, forgotten gems attempted similar things, but never really managed to achieve the success of CoH). The main campaign of Company of Heroes does play like a highlight reel of all the most recognizable moments of the Battle for Normandy, starting with the storming of Omaha as your very first mission, leading Able Company, which is quite the baptism by fire. The game then pivots to Fox Company and their early hours of D-Day as their soldiers try to regroup and start disrupting operations behind enemy lines. We then see the capture of Carentan, the capture of the port of Cherbourg, Saint Lô, with the whole thing coming to an end at the Battle of Chambois, leading Able Company to close the Falaise Pocket.

The game saw two highly acclaimed DLCs called Tales of Valor and Opposing Front, which also added plenty of singleplayer campaign, nearly all of it zooming into certain aspects of the Normandy battle. Tales of Valor has 1 mini-campaign from the Allied side leading the 82nd Airborne Division on Causeway, as well as 2 mini-campaigns from the German perspective: The Falaise Pocket, where you’ll lead elements of the Wehrmacht and Panzer Grenadiers, and the famous and fan-favorite Tiger Ace, where the entire thing is seen from the perspective of Kampfgruppe Lehr commander Maximillian Voss, and Hauptmann Joseph Shultz, in their fight against the British 7th Armored Division. This DLC introduced a unique control mechanism, which allowed players to control the targeting of the tank.

Last, but not least, the Opposing Fronts DLC brought 2 new campaigns as well. While one focuses on Market Garden, and it’s a totally new battle altogether (I might do an article on that when the time comes), the second campaign is called Liberation of Caen, and features a full 9-mission story. Quite a lot of content, and if you consider the fact that Company of Heroes is still very much an amazing game, even 20 years after its release, and goes often for less than a cup of coffee while on sale, it’s an absolute must-have for any fan of World War 2 and those looking to play something on D-Day.

7 – Gary Grigsby’s War In The West

Gary Grigsby is better known for its monstrous take on the Eastern Front, with War In The East and War In The East 2 being the two fan-favorite titles of the legendary wargame designer. But between the release of the first and the latter, War In The West came out, and it still stands as one of the most detailed computer wargames ever made, especially if you’re looking at the Western Front. Few games even dare to come close to 10% of its level of crazy detail. While most of the games we have covered in this article range from the tactical level to the operational, War In The West goes from Operational to Strategic, with the player commanding entire divisions on the ground and commanding the Allied strategic bombing campaign in the air. This is a true monstrous wargame that will take away weeks of your existence just to finish a single campaign, but it’s also the kind of title that’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience to play from beginning to end. It’s not the Dark Souls of wargames, because it’s so unphatommably complex that the right way to put it would be to say that Dark Souls is the War In The West equivalent of the action-RPG genre. I don’t say this lightly, and I know how enticing a prospect of playing something like this could be, but be very aware that despite its realism and detail, this isn’t a wargame that you can just pick up and play without a significant amount of time investment.

6 – The Troop

The Troop is one of my favorite strategy games set in World War 2, and a substantial part of my love for it comes from the way it depicts the events of the Normandy Campaign. While not the most realistic of affairs, it has a breadth of scenarios that will have you fighting in Normandy for months to come. The game features a story mode whose missions can be played from the Allied and German sides, and range from small infantry fights in the hedgerows, village assaults, desperate defenses, SAS raids, and armored confrontations. A skirmish mode and a dynamic campaign mode called Battlegroup, where your forces are persistent and carry over from battle to battle. I don’t want to dive too deep into the game’s mechanics, and if you want to know more about them, you can check my in-depth review, but The Troop is also an accessible game that plays extremely easy, and the AI is, quite honestly, one of the best I have ever seen in a strategy game, and will actually try to use real-life tactics against you, like pinning you down with mortar fire, trying to flush you out of defensive positions, flanking and waiting to ambush you. It’s so well done, and a very high recommendation from me.

5 – Call To Arms – Gates of Hell: Ostfront

Gates of Hell is, quite possibly, the best World War 2 strategy game you can play in 2026, for several reasons. The first one being that it’s a descendent from one of the best franchises of all time, Men of War, a real-time tactics game where players take control of the battlefield with a level of control that mixes the dynamic cover and Hollywood action from Company of Heroes with the level of control and detail of something like Combat Mission, and it’s all delivered with spectacular graphical fidelity, and unparalled levels of content, with the game featureing hundreds, if not thousands of units, endless dynamic campaigns, and plenty narratives ones too.

For this article, I want to zoom in on the Liberation and the Airborne DLCs. The first one is all about D-Day, and the actions that followed, and the campaigns also feature 2 different perspectives, one seen by the eyes of the 2nd Rangers and 3rd Armored Division of the United States Army, and the other from the 3rd Fallschirmjäger division and 116th Panzer, as the Germans. The second one will have you take command of the iconic 82nd and the 101st Airborne Divisions, with the first half of the campaign being all focused on the actions during D-Day and the following days, and then pivoting to Market Garden and, late in the campaign, towards the Ardennes. Of this entire list, Gates of Hell is the game that mixes in the accessibility of a classic RTS game with the detail necessary to convey the complexity of World War 2 tactics the best. It can be overwhelming if you’re not used to the amount of micromanaging necessary, but it’s an experience very much worth having. If you loved Company of Heroes and want something even better, and a lot more detailed, Gates of Hell is your next big thing.

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