The game has an interest in being a historically-accurate leadership simulator, an XCOM-like tactical/strategic battler, and a roleplaying game about tough choices with impactful consequences for you and your team. Unfortunately, it only succeeds in the first of these.


The developers here are doing something really interesting that I really feel like has never been done before with a real focus on historical facts, delivering the impact of war, and presenting a new and realistic model of how war was conducted in the time period. They are also an indie studio trying their best in a crowded market, and I respect that.

I have two core positive comments to make:
At its best moments, Burden of Command hits you hard with the reality of being a wartime leader, of making choices where there are is no clear answers, and then having to live with the consequences of that. This works best in the little vignette scenes between missions, where a simple multiple-choice system allows you to react to story events and set up the upcoming battles slightly differently. The writing hits hard and feels gritty and real, with heroics often being a matter of how the story is told rather than the facts on the ground. I do love this.

In addition, the tactics layer has some unique and interesting mechanical choices that mean that this game does play significantly differently to other games in the genre, and I applaud the developers for choosing to drive a game that is much more than a simple clone of other, more successful games. I don't want to move on without mentioning that it would have been very easy for them to create a cinematic XCOM-like in WW2 and leave it at that, and that I would not have purchased such a game.


This is where the review gets tough. After taking a short break from initially playing the game, I found that I had very little interest in picking it back up again, and I think that this is because while the game has credible claims at realism, leadership-centric game design, and fresh mechanics, it is not... actually a fun game.

The main problem I found was that the main part of the game, time-wise, is comprised of the tactical layer where you command your various squads and leaders in a hex-grid battle map. You move your guys up, do some suppression, maybe call in some heavy weapons. Unfortunately, every battle sort of plays out the same way - it's a difficult, grinding push into the teeth of enemy defenders until you get some of your guys to stand on the correct hex and the game finishes, hopefully fast enough and with low enough casualties.

That is, as far as I can tell, it. It's one difficult push into enemy positions after another, and the enemy AI doesn't need to be good (I don't think it does anything except fire at you if they have LOS), it just needs to exist and ambush-fire you whenever they make contact. It's not a very fun experience, and it's not very interesting once you've played a few repetitions of the same concept with slightly different backgrounds.

Afterwards, there is a short break to do some roleplaying (amazing stuff, but a couple minutes at most), a crude points-based system where you can give your squads a hope at becoming slightly better in a future difficult assault battle, and then you go back into another boring grind. Realistic this might be, you could point out, but it's not a fun game.

And that's what I walk away with - a game that's for sure devoted to its realism, but that seems to have forgotten that games exist to entertain, to hand at least a little power fantasy to the player in reward for their time and mastery. And this game seems to really want you to just play one mission over and over in order to tell you that war was hard and men die. A fitting museum concept, perhaps, but not a good game.

There are many other nitpicks to point out - the mostly pointless cutscenes, the hugely extended tutorial that still did not explore key concepts, a UI that often leaves me confused when making critical decisions, and a general lack of polish with typos and placeholder text in many places. These mar the surface finish of the game, but I do not mention them in detail because I believe the problems with the game are deeper and harder to solve.

With a heavy heart, I do not recommend.

This is not a game. It's an experience. There are a lot of logical inconsistencies--dead characters resurrecting, enemies enduring unbelievable damage, victories awarded despite evident failure. It doesn't matter. The story backing the gameplay is so compelling that overlooking faults is rewarded by yet more compelling story telling. Beyond that mentioned above, the combat is believable and engrossing. The story telling is immersive. This is one of the best wargames I've ever played and that's saying a lot coming from a grognard like myself. Buy this game, follow its storyline, and you'll be richly rewarded.

While there are a few bugs still floating around, I think this game is quite solid and enjoyable. It's unique mechanics employing actions and turns is an interesting twist and takes a little getting used to. But the progress is rewarding. I also love the psychological aspects of the game, where leaders and soldiers in combat, suffer ever increasing combat weariness, where different leaders lean into different archetypes, and where solid tactics are deeply rewarded. As the founder of Wargamer.com, growing up on turn-based military games, I give this one a big double thumbs up.