I can tell there was a lot of love and passion behind this game. Unfortunately it's so mechanically rough and deliberately obscure on gameplay elements I cannot recommend it. There's only so much I can put into a steam review and reasonably expect someone to read it, so I'll try to stick to larger points, but this will quickly get out of hand, because I am also passionate about this game.

As mentioned in other reviews, there are quite a few bugs as far as UI goes. I've had menus overlap, I've had images not load(or maybe it was supposed to just be a large red screen instead of an image that one time...) and in general the game is kinda clunky. The turns aren't "snappy", it takes a long time between actions, which is fine in some cases as it can give you an appreciation for infantry moving on an objective. But there are multiple times where you get artillery support, and you just have to sit there and watch shells land on a position that you don't have vision on, so you have no idea how effective they are, and it's not very visually impressive anyway...so you're kind of just waiting for it to end so you can go back to playing the game. I haven't once had a bombardment sweep through an area and go "Wow, they really messed those guys up." It just doesn't deliver the way it should. In that vein, the little text barks from units fall flat the same way for me as well. I don't expect a small indie game to have every line voiced, and I actually find that not having a voice for everything can immerse you more. The issue is that the barks don't really seem to...add anything. It's essentially your unit going [Commits war crimes.]...like cool, but something like that could probably benefit more from showing and detail versus just a one-off line of no consequence.

Now for the gameplay, which I have many more gripes with. This game wants you to feel the consequence and weight of your actions, so it opts to have as little manual saving as possible. It will save every turn, but it kind of scolds you if you try to reload a save and acts like you're invalidating the experience if you reload to avoid a poor outcome. That's a cool idea in theory, and it actually even has bugs related to trying to reload missions, so apparently reloading is so strongly discouraged it doesn't even need to work properly. The issue with this is that the game does a terrible job communicating things to you as the player. Did you not click your unit with an officer attached to it the exact number of times required to move only the officer? Congrats, your entire unit is now out of position and an extra order is wasted, no undo button, no confirmation. And if you're very unfortunate, you've now exposed them to enemy fire and they're suppressed, which will take even more effort to fix. Would you like to know where the fog of war is, what you have vision on and what you don't? Too bad, if you aren't going to meticulously click on each of your units or hexes on the map, you aren't going to find out, we won't darken the map for some reason. And LOS rules work by what's most convenient to screw you over. There's a map where for some reason, LOS is blocked by a row of trenches and can't see across the rest of the field to fire, even though that makes no sense as trenches would be in the ground, and not block vision at all(I think this is really so that the tank hiding in the brush behind them won't fire on your entire advance and completely break the mission, yet it will still be in place to ambush the flank that it's placed on because you would have expected it to fire earlier). But in the middle of the map, LOS runs through a trench line *that is also covered by trees*, and the only purpose seems to be because the enemy will have a tank on that road as well that can snipe yours if you try to maneuver across it. It's completely inconsistent and it feels deliberate so that you'll get sniped by a tank or MG42 that has incredible range and the game can point and go "Wow you really made a mistake there, do you feel the Burden" instead of the player saying "Wow the map design is trying really hard to trap me and screw me over". Recon by fire will sometimes reveal enemies, sometimes it won't. Assaults are mostly a test of morale and don't actually result in casualties, except for one mission where elite italian units killed anywhere between 2-5(!!) soldiers when I assaulted them...for some reason that was never explained, acknowledged, or ever happened again so far. The game had a sniper in a city that was shooting my units as they approached. I would have figured this was a unit on the map that I could have sweeped out, so when one of my units was shot in a hex that only had line of sight to its directly adjacent squares, I pushed into each of them...only to find out the only way to deal with the sniper is a narrative event involving my captain that 'requires your personal attention'...huh? My officers can't flush out a sniper on their own, I HAVE to use myself as bait if I don't want soldiers to die to an enemy that isn't even present on the map? Or maybe you think you're clever, and you want your Idealistic officer to use his special ability after the enemy has expended all their orders, so that when he stands up to inspire his men, nobody is able to return fire on him? Nah, it's just a dice roll and he'll die, you won't even see anyone shoot him on the map, he'll just drop dead. All of these things can happen through no real fault of the player, and yet the game scoffs at you and expects you to replay the entire turn, or just accept it and play on. It makes it feel more like I'm dealing with the burden of poor design than leadership.

Lastly I'll touch briefly on the writing, since I think it's one of the strongest points of the game by far. I really appreciate the videos and materials available in the game, I think it adds greatly to the atmosphere and it shows how much the developer truly cares about the game they're creating, and the message they're trying to send. However, even in this I feel like it is at odds with what it's trying to present itself as at times. One of the ideas in the game is that your leaders can die, sometimes as a result of your orders, sometimes as simple bad luck. Maybe they're wounded, or maybe they're dead. And one thing I think is very cool is that their replacement now has writing and scenes that you can experience, and obviously the other officer is gone. It makes me wonder what would have happened if I had sent someone other than Wilson to accept a surrender. What would have happened if Stern didn't get captured because I moved him forward too aggressively(the only time I've ever seen an enemy unit make an assault)? In the same breath, I think this ends up being a double-edged sword, because after the mission I lost Stern, he got what was practically a throwaway line to acknowledge his death and we moved right along, and he hasn't come up since. Wilson came up multiple times, so it feels more like that was 'meant' to happen. And of course, you have a whole dream sequence with the previous captain, which felt very over-the-top and not like the gritty, grounded leadership game Burden of Command is trying to be. Extremely out of place and felt more like what I'd expect from a movie.

All in all, the game isn't bad, and I want to finish it...but my experience is very mixed, and it's frustrating for the wrong reasons a lot of the time. I can't recommend it unless you're a hardcore fan of strategy games and you've played most of what's out there like I have. And it's painful not to recommend an indie game like this, because if it isn't successful, we'll likely never get a follow-up, and I think a game that could learn from the flaws of this one would have a lot of potential. Personally I've always thought the pacific theatre of WW2 was far more brutal, and it would be very well suited to the tests of leadership that this game tries to get you thinking about.

I read about this game in 2020 on a warship in the stars and stripes paper, and when i got off i made a point to wishlist it. In the years since I thought the project must have died, and that struck me as too bad, I really wanted to see an indie game like it made. To see it release 5 years later truly was a surprise, and to learn they've been working hard and playtesting the whole time, how could you ask for more?
There are some problems with the initial release but for me they are quite surmountable.
The mechanics are unconventional in a well-explained attempt to represent WW2 combat. It does tick me off sometimes when the germans ignore my machine guns a turn or two but eventually you will get how it works. All of the studying i have done shows every war has to be learned and this is part of the experience, as it should be. That's most of the fun of the game, and a significant part of how it immerses you into the role of commanding troops in WW2.
TLDR: Awesome if you have a deep interest in WW2

The immediate narrator sounded pompous and egotistical, and when i tried to skip it HE MADE A ACTUAL WINDOWS POPUP, TELLING ME I NEED TO RECONSIDER. This is erroneous. The first boxes of text later with him still speaking in first person, this guy is calling his own team DUCKLING he had to keep from leaving, despicable way to talk about another person especially someone who worked to make this game what it is. Would not enjoy my boss calling me their duckling.

This fourth wall break wasn't an just some assault on my immersion, not not really my complaint, but come on! the FIRST impression of this game, after seeing some actually interesting unit cards for characters that i Thought i was about to meet, and suddenly i'm ambushed by a rather an unwarranted personal cameo by the lead dev patronizing me telling me this game breaks convention and that i must adapt. Dude, stop Barking at me, and don't have a popup telling me i need to reconsider, im not one of your 'ducklings', you're not objectively smarter than every player of your game. Take a page from a game called Legionaries Life, a very similar game that is a favorite of mine, it has much less combat like this, but tons of story/history, and dedication. All this Without the SINGLE dev, one man dev, whose sequel was an even HIGHER level of complexity and new game mechanics, and you don't hear him at the beginning of the game stroking his ego and telling you to gird your loins for a game you may not understand how to play, especially a game so convention breaking, in a patronizing voice.

Dont tell me how to think or feel about a game, dont tell me your groundbreaking, show me, and ill feel it. The lead dev, whose first mention of his team is three secondary dialogue choices away from attempting to actually start the game, where he calls his co-workers ducklings he wrangled into working, and i dont like how entitled this dev sounds, theres plenty of small games with hard working main devs that dont project this hard. he barks at me how i need to change my expectations because the game is different from the rest from other games, and its clear the dev feels hes breaking convention, but its unconventional to break 4th wall in the intro sequence, and i think this is proof of that.

if this seems like an innocuous complaint that doesn't give credence to actual game play, yeah, i stepped away after hearing and reading it. it probably didn't mean alot to most people but i just spent 25$ on this and it left a terrible taste in my mount. Unconventional and unprofessional 4th wall interjection as the first impression made me wonder if the game was worth the money i spent.

its okay to thank players for trying a small game, but i felt like i was watching a movie with the director commentary on, and it frustrated me. If you have a tutorial, get it done in-world, with some of the characters we see before the game loads. you said you were gonna interject to teach me how to play and, honestly, I dont want to hear you talk, like a movie's director commentary like i said. I as a single player who experiences this piece of media, don't want the directors commentary when im trying to experience it the first time. if the dev reads, i hope you do, and i'd love to see a response void of smugness from em, but this keep in mind what new players might think about how you interject in the game, molding their expectations before they can make their own opinion, being told how to play by the creator of the game instead of a commander of a combat group for instance is fauxpas for a reason.

and a prompt for anything other than an error, and settings change, is really obnoxious , especially when simply trying to skip your dialouge, i wouldnt have wanted to skip it and you woulnt need a skip prompt if it was in world characters speaking to me, even through text dialouge.

Edit: the developer claims people enjoy the game more when he interjects proven true via study, but im not playing this whole thing skipping constant 4th wall breaks, when the game is still trying to tell me via text what to do. refunded my 25$ because i cant sit through it