10 – Football, Tactics & Glory
With the World Cup in full swing, I thought of including Football, Tactics & Glory in here, because I’m sure a ton of you are on the lookout for something other than EA Football or Football Manager. If you’re looking for a turn-based strategy title that replaces automatic rifles with footballs and aliens with opponents in different-colored jerseys, then FTG might be the game for you. It’s XCOM, but with football. There’s even a recent World Championship DLC, which adds a National Team Management Career.
9 – Age of Empires II – Definitive Edition
It’s Age of Empires II – Definitive Edition, the best edition of one of the best strategy games of all time, a title that defined millions of players, and the one whose fundamentals are so perfectly nailed down to a tee that even three decades later, it’s still the most played RTS around. You cannot go wrong with AoE2.
8 – Ultimate General: Civil War
I’ll probably do another article going over the best deals when it comes to wargames, but in case I don’t, I do want to leave my recommendation to Ultimate General: Civil War, the best american civil war video game ever made, and a true wargame that can be enjoyed by a massive audience without having to read a 200 page manual on how each hex and counter come together to resolve combat. Designed by Game Labs, a now defeuct studio that was led by the famous Total War modder, Darthmod, the Ultimate General take on the combat dragged the American Civil War kicking and screaming out of its often obtuse wargaming rules of the 1970s and made a slick, minimalist UI, a simple control scheme, and a semi-dynamic campaign that were widely praised by players and critics acrossed the board. It’s still recognized as the best game that the studio ever made.
7 – Chroma Squad
Stunt actors quit their jobs and decided to build their own Power Rangers-inspired TV show is the premise behind Chroma Squad, a lovely, but largely forgotten turn-based strategy game from 2015, developed by Behold Studios, that was quite the rage when it came out, so let’s kickstart this one back up again. The combat of the game is actually supposed to be a “coordinated” stunt between all the actors, and the game unfolds like a series of episodes that are being recorded as you play, and you go from recording in a basic studio to a massive production, with the scale and complexity of the enemies and your available options going along for the ride too. It’s not the most complex of titles, but it’s a lovely game you can play from beginning to end in 15 or so hours.
6 – Unity of Command II
I might have said that I was only going to recommend a wargame, but that was a ruse to have you read my Unity of Command II entry! Keeping up with the whole “let’s recommend accessible wargames for this list” mentality, I think that Unity of Command II is the go-to title if you want a more traditional experience, at the operational-level, with a focus on logistics, that doesn’t overwhelm the player with minutia, and its super accessible, especially if you never played a wargame before, and it’s a cheap ticket into what can be otherwise a very expensive hobby. The only criticism I have about Unity of Command II is that it can end up feeling a bit like a puzzle game most of the time, instead of a real strategy game, where optional moves are very much defined beforehand, and it’s up to you to trial and error your way into a perfect score.
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