Battle Brothers

This is one of the only games that I play - absolutely love, develop my band, craft my own narrative - and then eventually uninstall to play something else.

Months later, I re-install it, fall in love again, and have an absolute blast.

Just buy wartales, this game is missing 95% of your hit rolls and getting one tapped by every enemy. Or straight up fighting impossible odds at start just trying to find a mission.

Fantastically difficult and strategic, also incredibly unforgiving of mistakes in the best ways. When ya win you feel like you earned it, and when you lose (outside of getting chased down by a better force or engaging in a harder contract with an unknown battle) you can usually learn from it and succeed next time. Good modding scene too.

One of the best and most in depth tactics game I've ever played. Challenging but fair, My only wish is for a bigger map and more out-of-combat options.

good game, and more thing to do with mod, always came back after sometime

I was on the fence because this game is UGLY the characters DO NOT LOOK GREAT.

but WOW this game is INCREDIBLE. if you are judging it purely for the aesthetics, PLEASE play it. it's SO GOOD.
many strategy games force the player to take action because of like, a built in timer or something in a mission.

imagine me being FLOORED at the fact that i was told to take down a bandit camp at the top of a hill,
and the bandits WOULD NOT MOVE from that hill until they ran out of ammo.
ive played a LOT of xcom 2 and sometimes the ai would just give up on an advantageous position for literally no reason.

my only complaint is that i love longswords make the longsword better that's all. give it riposte or something, that makes sense for a longsword. okay thanks bye love you.

This game is not for everyone, especially if you want to play iron man, not to cheat. You have to aware that you can loose dozens of hours of play in two minutes. But somehow this is a part of the drill. Personally, i love the game mechanics and the combat, but you have to have nerves of steel for it. Otherwise you need to save scum.

Excellent game, love the challenge the game presents. I also love the devs are still updating the game with content after all these years.

Very fun game and always challenging. The developers had originally said they had stopped supporting it but have since returned to it, and it makes me excited for the potential of additional content.

I've been playing this game for years and I keep coming back to it. It is surprisingly gritty and actually stimulates my adult imagination with the roleplay aspects of the game, which is very surprising.

I initially played to try to be the best but now I play to be the most fun, which sometimes means having weaker mercs but they can do more stuff in a fight.

I recommend this for people who like single player turn-based tactical RPGs with roguelike stakes.

I would not recommend this for people who like fast paced action heavy games.

Addictive gameplay. Can't stop going on just one more run in ironman mode.

Battle Brothers: I Brought a Baguette to a Swordfight (And Regret Everything)

I thought I was ready.
Mercenary life? Strategy? Grit?
Please.
I adjusted my scarf, lit a cigarette, and marched into battle like a man who believed in miracles.

Mistake number one.

[hr]

I marched out with a soggy baguette and good intentions.
I returned with nothing but scars and the vague scent of public humiliation.

[hr]

The Experience:

Maybe I'm soft.
Maybe I need dopamine pings and victory jingles.
But this game?
This game kicked me down a muddy hill, called me a slur, and charged me full price for the experience.

[hr]

The Graphics:

Everyone looks like a rotten thumb nailed to a popsicle stick.
Gritty?
Sure.
If you define "gritty" as "faces you'd expect to find floating in the harbor."

[hr]

Final Thoughts:

It’s brutal.
It’s joyless.
It’s a slow-motion car crash where you pay extra to watch your own funeral.

I adjusted my scarf, took one last drag of my cigarette, muttered "c’est la mort," —
and deleted the game without even looking back.

Some battles you fight.
Some battles you walk away from because life’s too short for thumb-men and broken dreams.

[hr]

• Difficulty: Feels like a tax audit during an earthquake.
  
• Graphics: Potatoes with PTSD.
  
[*]Reviewer: Left the battlefield for a bakery and never returned.

👎 Not Recommended

Fantastic game. Developers STILL release content for free. One of the few gaming companies that deserve your money. Highly recommend.

I feel like my opinion on the game tends to be more along the lines of "It's mostly a meh", but I'm giving a negative review because there are so many little annoyances that add up and make me want to slam my head against my desk.

My biggest problem is that in my opinion losing just isn't "fun" in this game, it just means several hours of tedium grinding up new units, and especially in late game where the enemies are much stronger it means you can have borderline useless units in your party that you have to baby which I just find tedious.

Even if you prepare by having some reserve units that are at least somewhat levelled and can just slot in to replace fallen units, it can still take hours to get back to the same point you were at. The reason I find it so frustrating is because its an rng game, and an important unit can die no matter how well you position or prepare, because if you just get a string of bad luck, that's it.

It's compounded by bugs or infuriating mechanics in the game, for example the overmap pathfinding is just plain bad, if you're being chased by a stronger party you have to micromanage practically each step because sometimes the ai will just decide to do a hard right or left to try reach a road or piece of flat land that's close by because it would technically reduce the amount of time you would need to reach wherever you told them to go, but in doing so they end up running right into the enemy you were trying to avoid.

All well and good you think, I'll just retreat from the battle, but wait you're in a mountain map, and you spawned in the low ground and so the enemy can just rain arrows down on you as you try flee, ok, no problem, I have shields on my melee units and good ranged defence on my own ranged units, so I should be able to retreat with only a few wounds, oh one of my stronger units just died because they got hit 4 times in a row by 30% crossbow bolts, alright, well I guess I'll go fuck myself.

Also don't make the mistake of using the retreat button in the menu because it's impressively consistent at getting your units killed, which means yes you will need to micro manage your retreat which just adds to the tedium I feel playing this game.

Similar things happen in forest maps where you can just be fully surrounded, though I find that its much more survivable because the enemies tend to be spread out and you can *usually* make it out without a unit dying.

Other things like bugs where the end battle screen gets stuck and you can't click "run them down" or "it's over" so you're stuck until you restart the game and now have to hope the battle goes as well as it did last time, or maybe you got a random crash even though you're playing vanilla on a game that came out 8 years ago.

And yes you can save scum to avoid situations that feel unfair. I'm also aware I can turn the difficulty down or download any number of mods that make the game easier, but my view is just that I shouldn't feel forced to save scum or add mods to have the game "play fair".

There's also legendary locations which honestly you really need meta knowledge before going into otherwise the odds are that you're going to completely wipe, but I'm more understanding about that just cause that's the gimmick, legendary location, supposed to be unfair and what not.

Overall the game can be fun, and there's moments where I genuinely have a blast playing, but I honestly find myself more and more closing the game in a worse mood than when I opened it.

Again this is just my opinion and there's going to be stuff I haven't mentioned because i'm writing this as a stream of consciousness and this isn't supposed to be an in-depth critique, just my quick overall thoughts. There are plenty of good things about the game that other reviews have pointed out but this is just how I feel about the game after a few hundred hours.

Indie Sandbox Tactical RPG at its FINEST! If you like anything like Sid Meier's Pirates, Starsector or Mount & Blade look no further, this is a MUST play! I just started playing in 2025 and this game has blown my mind!

Be warned, Battle Brothers is tough as nails, prepare to get wrecked if you think it's gonna hold your hand, though there are various difficulty options you can play with.

Graphics are beautiful 2d, i love the art style! Music tracks are masterpieces and sound fx/ambience are all very good.

Battle Brothers feels like it has been made by developers that actually wanted to make a good game rather than only thinking about $$$ or pushing stupid agendas. It's a ''modern'' game but has the spirit and soul like it was made back in the 90's or early 00's.

Medieval Chess with depth fitting for modern age. A must for those who enjoy turn based hardcore battlers.

Great music, great writing and good mechanics. Fairly challenging even on the easier difficulty levels, and it really rewards knowledge of the mechanics - choosing the right equipment and troops for the enemy you are encountering is crucial. DLCs are all great too! Lots of content - there's still some fights I haven't even attempted yet with 2k+ hours played...

One of my all time favourites.

Great game mechanics, story telling and Music/Sounds.
An all-around superb experience.

Fun tactical battle sandbox, spiced with some cool enemies and fun writing. 5/5

difficult for the sake of being difficult. strategy/tactical games are my bread & butter but even on the easiest diffficulties your characters will get one shot even if you do everything absolutely perfectly. you'd probably like this game if you enjoy mix-maxing games to their ABSOLUTE limit cause it seems like thats the only way to progress in this game, and even then you're still prooobably gonna get 1shot the second you enter combat lmao



good idea, poor execution with weird RNG combat
3/10

This is one of the best underrated gems that you will ever find, provided you have the time and patience to learn its ins and outs. It has great story telling, many events that are character specific, many great battles, skirmishes, unlikely allies and monsters! Overall a really great experience that can be frustrating at times, especially if you're newer, so I recommend playing on beginner difficulty the first few tens of hours, especially if you're not used to these types of rather unforgiving but highly rewarding games. I would honestly hope for either a sequel or more content for this game because the developers have struck gold.

Game launches to white screen. I have tried all the fixes but was unable to fix the issue. Others are having the same issue with no fix from Devs.

Excellent indie title. A must if you love turn based tactics games, optimization, and brutal combat.

I had higher expectations from this game honestly. But it's still a good game.
I feel like we could have had less characters that were more unique, or being able to have more than 12 characters in the field, but this way I feel I am not satisfied with how many people I am able to use, neither do i feel the 12 I have are particularly interesting or unique.

I like this game and it is so good that other games are referred to as a battle brothers type of game. However, man do I suck at this game. I die so frequently, not just one guy but the whole team. I still love it though.

Game is hard at start but gets fun later

the best turn based mercernary rpg management game out there nocap

What a phenomenal game. I keep looking for other games to scratch the itch Battle Brothers has given me but honestly it's hard to find something this well-written, this immersive (through its music, pacing, general vibe), and this entertaining.

At first, the art style put me off. I thought it was stupid that they only show the upper half of every character (like pudgy little chess pieces). It grew on me really quickly, though, and now I love it. Especially because there's really great art on those pudgy little chess pieces and throughout the game in general.

Combat might seem simple at first but it's actually got a surprising amount of depth. And the sound design really helps everything feel crunchy and satisfying - when you see an enemy go down in one hit it's extremely satisfying.

I wish the game had better defined bro personalities so I could get even more attached to my bros than I already am (Glad to see the devs are going for handwritten characters for their new game).

Once again, a phenomenal game and, in my opinion, I think it might be the best mercenary company game out there.

10/10 I love my bros

It took around 10 hours for me to fully connect with the core game-play loop, and It all ended a bit abruptly at the 40hr mark, but it was an incredibly rewarding experience while it lasted. There's tons more content to explore though, of course. Overall, one of the best video games I've ever played, and I remember the ZX Spectrum.

Play at beginner difficulty to learn the rules. It is actually fun and less frustrating to play at beginner difficulty. You will still lose people at this difficulty, so the challenge is still there, but you are more likely to be able to "win" the game and enjoy the process of playing it.

Not sure if I should be mad or glad that I took so long to try this game. Battle Brothers is addicting as f***. A good example of not to judge a book by its cover. Within the first five hours of this game, I ended up buying all the DLCs because I don't want to be missing anything when I explore this new world with my Band Of Poachers. I hate when I lose my men especially when I had them since the start but Dietmar, The Chickensh** was not meant to live forever so eventually I learned to accept these losses and just try to improve with each experience. Highly recommend.

A very fun game, that puts as much importance on management as it does strategy. Having your company armed properly and trained to fill specialized roles is as important as making intelligent strategic choices in combat. The day to day can really make or break your company in a battle as much as making the right or wrong choices during. That said sometimes you're just gonna die.
This is a game best played knowing you're going to lose. Even with only nearly 20 hours and only managing easy and normal campaigns, I've seen how quickly things can go to shit both on and off the battlefield. Even my best run thus far averages one dead company member every week, and honestly? It's kind of the fun of it.

I want to like this game, I really do, but the amount of micromanaging and extreme difficulty curve make this game unbearable for most of the time. I enjoy a challenge, but this game requires managing so many elements and there is always the specter of a single mistake or unlucky roll wiping your party. The excitement of the successes you will have is massively outweighed by the amount of work this game requires. The combat feels unbalanced, the slog of waiting as your party laboriously traverses the map as it hemorrhages resources with your characters becoming increasingly miserable so you can arbitrage some found armor or goods is needlessly and painfully grindy. I can't help but wonder if the positive reviews come from the kind of player who will min-max a grinding joyless game to prove they can, and maybe that is you, but this game is simply not fun and needlessly difficult.

It takes a little time and effort to be able to fight and not getting frustrated, but it is whorth it.
Great game, great mechanics.

Like a 2D bannerlord but with its own frustrations. I like the concept and the overall game play, roam around, get contracts, rally your bros and fight things, but it takes so long to train up some competent brothers.

I have my main archer up on a cliff with height advantage, with perks, chance is 80% and.... it whiffs. Not only that, it seems everyone's got shields anyway so often the archer is useless. It also doesn't help that it feels like every enemy has more defence & attack accuracy than your poor peasant mercenaries.

I think I'm too old to have the patience to grind through the mechanics. Yes, get some shields, use spearwall, stick some dudes with polearms in the back of course, but it's just not that fun grinding through battle after battle hoping the dice rolls in your favor.

If you want a gritty, punishing and frustrating game, then this is it for you. I'm just not sure it feels all that tactical.

I can't tell if this game is just communicating very poorly with what I should do or if it's just a bad game.

If you feel like engaging enemies at the correct position or hoping that animals run into your spears over and over is considered tactical then I guess this might be the game for you.

The biggest problem is that a 1 skull mission can be anything from lowly bandits that don't do shit to monsters that one shot your band of 12 equipped guys. You can do a three skull mission for 2k gold and not fight at all, while dying to a mission that would give you 300 on completion.

I'm sure you should just play it safe and only take the easy ones, but it's a grind and almost nothing prevents a streak of bad luck taking one of your trained guys down. It's very much like Darkest Dungeon 1 in that way. Very tedious gameplay loop.

The dull character progression was improved by mods (unfortunately no workshop integration), but got nuked by a recent update that didn't add much content :(

Great game very replayable hope there is more content in the future!

Oh man. I was looking for a turn base tactical RPG like FF tactics but ended up buying this one and its worth every penny. For starter. Its like Mount and Blade and Heroes III Might & Magic made something and this is the gem they created. You get to create mercenaries and take contracts and maybe later on join a faction. if you love reading like I do. You get to know their story. I almost scream when one of favorite merc got almost killed by a direwolf luckily he evaded the death blow. This game is got me frustrated in a good way. Where to go to find more contracts, weapons, supply and everything. Keeping my mercs paid and alive while taking out dangerous quest. Im looking forward when the day I fully build, equip and make my mercs famous throughout the kingdom.

Probably one of if not my all time favorite games. Genuinely enjoyable, and tough without much forgiveness.

Pros:
- Great strategy and team managment game
- Some of the best world building and story telling I've come across
- Amazing Combat, Dynamic Map, Favorite soundtrack of any game
- DLCs are worth it, each and every one.

Cons:
- Unforgiving. A single mistake can run hours of a playthrough
- Long time to learn
- Difficulty curve spikes insanely fast. One day your busting heads, the next your getting yours busted.


Final Rating: 10/10 Worth it, glad I found it, and it's been a solid addition to my collection, and I plan on playing it for years to come.

Its a bit like Mechwarrior Mercenaries, just set in the middle ages and with bandits, lindwurms and monsters, and the actual battles are fought turn-based on a hex field.

Don't let yourself be fooled by the cartoonishness of the optics - under the hood of this baby is a mercilessly simulated tactical simulator of medieval warfare that is coated into a rpg-mercenary management sim. Combat is extremely deadly and requires a lot of care and planning, or things will turn bad really fast for you.

The good:
-Battle mechanics are mature, and simulated mechanics are complex and make a lot of sense. Big helmets make you see less, move slow and run out of gas fast. The range of weaponry is wide and suits a lot of playstyle variety, while most niches have actual relevance on the battlefield. Its the only game that I know that differenciates hammers from maces, which is cool in itself. In general, the behaviour of enemies is pretty clever for a computer. Enemies time their assaults so that they might come out on top, goblin cavalry tries to flank your line to get to your archers, and when the big dude with the even bigger axe steps closer, you can watch mere peasants shit themselves in real time as their morale drops. Losing enemies actually run when given the opportunity. Bow-Heavy forces try to stall you so they can shoot you dead, berserkers charge you immediately. It all makes a lot of sense and feels really well implemented.

-All opposing forces have their own style, behaviour and handle quite differently. Undead horde? Turtle under your shieldwall and shoot/hack them down bit by bit. Do they have ghosts with them? Must hack a gap through the line asap to get them before your morale collapses. Same goes for a Necromancer, who has the habit of reviving the dead in the exact second that your strike team tries to cross the small gap to catch him. Goblins on an open field? Piece of cake, just rush them or shoot them dead. Goblins in a tight woodland enviroment? Vietnam vibes intensifying.

-Artstyle is just great. At first I was not sure if I liked the display of the men on the battlefield as waist-up figurines, but it gives a lot of character, and they really made it perfectly clear what the status of the dude is, just by looking at him without any leed for a status bar. World map also looks fantastic and very much alive, teeming with character despite being procedurally done, that was probably not easy.

-Dialogues, Quest texts etc. are - despite being in plain text - interesting, well written and full of character. Events are really nicely done and are a great way of transporting the atmosphere. I also liked a lot how a brawl in your team is just not a big deal. Balgor kicked your teeth in? Welcome to the suck.

-Steep learning curve and a suprisingly deep stats/perk system makes powering your team up fun.

-There is a ton of items and even legendary/named stuff that scratches your itch for hoarding.

The only drawbacks for me:
-Especially in the beginning you get kicked in the face quite badly, even at the easiest settings. It took me about 5-6 attempts and some reading to get into things and not everybody might have the motivation to stay on it.
-At the moment there is quite an annoying bug with Radeon cards, that causes the game to glitch out at random intervals. Its still playable but it sucks and has the potential to corrupt your saves.

Summarized: Battle Brothers gud. You buy.

It's like X-Com, but at least you have a chance in the early game with X-Com. 10/10

Great game, good mechanics. Ballbustingly difficult in ironman. All my homies hate gheists.

This game is more about managing risk than it is about tactics. You cannot count on your attacks landing a hit, so you must always ask yourself, "do I have the manpower in reserve to replace this soldier if his attack fails?". You must keep a large gold buffer to replace key soldiers and equipment at a moment's notice. This is the only strategy that works, and once you realize it, the game becomes a boring slog. A tactic that worked one time will fail the next time, for no reason. A tactic that should fail will work. You get punished for fighting uphill and rewarded for attacking downhill, but hits are so random, it really doesn't matter at all. The only thing that matters is if you have soldiers and gold in reserve should things go sideways.

Your company has no leader, it's just a constant cycling of expendable soldiers. Hard to feel attached to anything you do, you don't really build anything. You will wander around the map, enticed by cool sounding encounters, only to talk yourself out from them because you don't have enough manpower in reserve should you lose. You are constantly re-loading from previous saves to re-roll an important battle. Sure, when the hits land and you beat a tough battle, it feels great. But it might just feel great because you spent an hour before that doing boring trade missions where you watch your group move around the screen and do nothing.

Every once in a while I pick this game up again, only to remember why I stopped playing it. With a few critical changes, it could become much more entertaining. Let me revive soldiers, or at least nominate a core group to be revived. It's annoying and unfun to constantly replay the same starting levels over and over for new soldiers. If you're going to let me reload from saves, just build it into the game, let me revive soldiers, stop wasting my time with stupid save-reload cycles. Give me some kind of indicator of the difficulty for encounters so that I don't have to reload if I enter one that turns out to be way beyond my group's abilities. I have no idea if the crypt is going to be a handful of zombies or a crazy necromancer. The whole game just screams at you to do nothing until you can overwhelm a battle, it's just boring.

When I first started playing this game, I was a little turned off by the character models. I didn't really like the half of a character on a base like a board game.

However, 724 hours later this is probably the most played game I have in my library even over Rimworld. This is all in all an absolutely amazing game. Its tough, but it's not unfair.

Fun game but it would be a straight banger with workshop support

This is how Turn-Based Strategy RPG game is done. Don't need big budget CGI, just brilliant gameplay mechanics with the most dedicated team of developers who care about their game and not the money. The pinnacle of Turn-Based Strategy RPG game.

Poorly balanced, all I see is miss miss miss. My units sometimes get over 10 misses in a row. What is this gameplay just watching your units miss over and over in such a punishing game. Also world map is empty. I suggest you don't waste your time on this game

Lots of good, a bit of bad.

There's a good amount of equipment, and there's a resource-management element to the game, which works well. It reminds me of the spaceship-adventure game FTL: Faster than Light, which also had crew you had to take on, equipment, management of the ship, etc.

Tons of combat abilities, troops level up, minor and major status effects occur, and all of the equipment does something different (a pole-arm has greater range, a flail might be able to attack all adjacent tiles, etc.)

And it has a 2-D 'Mount-and-Blade' vibe, which is a game I really enjoy.


However, I already see a few big hurdles though, too.

For one, the graphics... the only way to see who is who is to look at the direction they are facing, which, okay, but it's not an easy thing to distinguish sometimes once there are a bunch of fighters on the field.

Secondly, the random generation of campaigns is all over the place. Even with it set to Beginner/Beginner, the random campaign generation can put you down in a city where the only contract available is to go fight 8 undead with your 6 poorly equipped soldiers. One has to learn to travel light and only take easy caravan contracts at first. Not the end of the world, but the game is a bit too random in that your first quest could be insurmountable sometimes.

Third, some supplies could use more of an in-game calculator... your number of provisions at any time may say you can go for 6 days, but in reality, that's including stuff about to spoil in just ONE day. That really is a beginner's trap, to have it calculate based not on how many days each provision really can last, but just on how many are there regardless of expiration date.


Overall, it's a fun concept with a lot going for it, and I intend to keep at it for a while, but the learning curve is a bit steeper than it needs to be, and the difficulty is going to be prohibitive if you aren't already familiar with turn-based tactical games (like X-Com 2, for instance).

Marginal recommend thus far.

I can recognize that this game is objectively good, but it's just not for me.

I really like that it requires you to adapt custom strategies for fantasy monsters that are very real, unique threats. It's not just goblins for the sake of goblins.

That being said, I just found myself not being engaged by the pacing, or satisfied with the combat.

This game is awesome.

It is a top down 2D turn-based squad command game, and yet somehow the combat goes harder than a good selection of the FPSs I've played.

The feeling when one of your mercs decapitates an enemy soldier, or when an armoured orc shield charges your lines to get to your archer and cuts him down in one blow? Yeah. This game stirs the blood up something fierce.
Also, if you happen to be experiencing the undead endgame crisis, slain combatants may spontaneously stand up as an impromptu third faction.

The game is set in a procedurally generated low magic fantasy world populated by warring factions, monstrous pests, and terrifying monsters.

You'd be forgiven for thinking that the giant spiders are just pests, but try fighting forty of them. My most cherished memory is of the last survivors of my company surrounded in a clearing, holding the line against the spiders as their numbers continued to multiply. As there was no hope of retreat the company fought to the last man. It was epic. Also, a prime example of the eventual, inevitable fate of your squad.

If you have even a passing interest in turn based strategy, this is well worth a look.

You really have to be ok with statistics for this one.