Great game if you love history, turn-based strategy, or roleplaying games. What I enjoy about this game is that it simulates the doctrine of modern combat, you are shooting to suppress and pin instead of just to kill people. Instead of health, the effectiveness of your units is gauged by morale and suppression as opposed to just a health bar. One thing to note is that the game is always ironman, you can't save scum at all, so keep that in mind if you're the kind of person who gets frustrated and reloads after you don't hit a 50% RNG.

Super surprised with how active and responsive the devs are, I've encountered a few bugs here and there but the game is being actively patched and worked on.

I've now beaten the game on the highest difficulty, and now pass my thoughts and judgement on the game.

Burden of Command is a flawed gem. There's nothing else quite like it, and as far as video games go, that's a major plus. There's a strong sense of progression, with managing your men as they try to survive and accomplish your objectives. I've seen criticisms of the basic systems of the game, but I fundamentally disagree with these, the basic systems are good. The idea is that you must keep your units in good order for them to have a good combat efficacy, and this is accomplished by a number of officer-led systems, such as bolstering and rallying. Many games overly focus on killing and not enough on morale, and this is a game about morale.

I've seen criticisms that the tutorial is too long or onerous. I didn't feel this way. It's a story-telling RPG, you're here because it's long. This is another strength, the story-telling elements. Frankly, if it was just the shooting, it would be an acceptable strategy game, but with this it becomes far more compelling.

I did feel this game had some serious flaws, or rather some things I would add to fix the game. The game encourages you not to save-scum, however I felt I had to start doing so, because about 60% of my casualties resulted not from calculated risks, but simply because I had zero idea a tile had LoS to another tile with an enemy in it; or that situation that seems to happen constantly, where there's a mixed bag of well-ordered and broken units, but you have no idea whether the danger icon, which shows for your unit's movement allowance going through an enemy LoS, is for the unit that won't fire at you, or the one which will inflict 6 deaths. There's an LoS tool to use for this, but it's clunky. If you click on a tile on the ground and move your camera at all, the tool deactivates, so you better hope that enemy is on screen with you. The only sure way is to click enemy by enemy, and try to remember which hexes are the real dangerous ones, and which ones are the fake dangerous ones. This could be easily fixed by having every enemy be highlighted who can fire on a particular tile when you highlight it, or some other such solution. Another good thing would be if you could "lock in" a dangerous enemy LoS, so you could keep their range highlighted when you're moving your units. I lost men constantly to: "They could fire from there?" And not: "I'm making this decision consciously, weighting my advance over safety", which is the whole conceit of the game.

It is also very annoying whenever your camera controls are taken from you, when you have to wait for artillery to play out, which may take 15-20 seconds depending on the circumstances.

The game also has quite a number of bugs, but they seem to be quick on fixing them.

Apparently the American army started using women and children, Volkssturm style, because I played very cautiously, and still was very much hurting for reinforcements (I almost always got Major Victories for the Men), just barely able to keep my company at full strength scenario to scenario. I would be 3 or 4 people down most scenarios. I didn't know the American army had such a recruiting crisis that it was willing to send in half-formed squads.

So, in toto, the game's flaws are a reasonably large number of petty annoyances which add up, whereas the core systems and gameplay is actually really good. I hope they polish this more, and I think it will be a really good title.

The RPG elements of Legionary's Life mixed with a compelling hex/turn based strategy system. Really very good