Battle Brothers

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.

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.

Yes I would recommend this game, It's really fun after the initial 50 hours and you understand whats going on to some sort of degree. Play this game I will try the new update now. cheers! (my dog gave birth to 6 puppies about 10 years ago)

This game is simply great.
Lots of builds for individual units, tons of possible company compositions, interesting starting scenarios, great challenges.
The writing is amazing, the art style is fantastic, the tactical combat is deep and fun.
The only thing that could spoil your fun is random percentage of hitting, but there are workarounds. Although you can't completely negate it, but it's totally doable.
And yes, it's not an easy game, more like old school, where the game lets you have your fun but doesn't take your hand and lead you. I recommend watching a couple of youtube guides if you struggle.

Can't wait for the devs` next game.

pretty based low-fantasy medieval mercenary company sim. basic management of food and supplies to keep men moving. find a job and hit men on the head with blunt objects to get paid. watch as your star merc gets his head taken off by an orc and fight the urge to save-scum.

battle brothers is best enjoyed when you roll with the punches, and make the best of a bad lot. the music starts to get a bit same-y after a while, but otherwise the presentation is simple and gritty. deeply enjoyable experience that causes an alarming amount of stress, at least sometimes undeservedly. worth a look if you enjoyed darkest dungeon (or comparable titles), especially on sale.

Hell of a learning curve and the RNG can be brutal, but its addictive and fun if you like tactics gameplay/medieval themed dark fantasy. I'm 40 hours in and still start on beginner difficulty.

If you don't like pure RNG where your guys consistently miss 80% chance to hits and enemies consistently succeed 30% chance to hits don't get this.

This is a very good game, but 11 hours in the flaws started to show. There is a certain amount of "setup". Let me give you an example. You take a job, and along the road are challenged out of the blue by a superior armed and trained force. This encounter is designed for you to lose. No question. The game designer is telling you to drop the job and retreat, its a "lesson". I believe this kind of thing treats the player like a child. I've seen this before in many other games, and quite frankly its a cop out. Its another example of games designers who are not half as clever as they think they are, lecturing the player. It's other flaws include rather repetitive gameplay, equipment that needs this much repair in real life would mean you would never get your grass cut without repairing your mower every day and poor mission design. They are basically all the same. Also its definitely not worth its price tag.

Really fun game, but...
The only problem is there are so many anti-tactical things that stop you from being able to plan. "If bad luck makes your plan fail it wasn't a good plan" How am I meant to make a plan when I have no idea on the terrain, very limited troop placement, inconsistent enemies and task difficulties and vague mechanics. It's a shame because it's a really fun game and I would recommend it but the steep learning curve also comes with a frustrating realisation that the game is more shallow that you think it will be.

learning curve is steep but the payoff is in getting familiar with your menagerie of murder bums. combat is simple but challenging and very satisfying after leaving battles battered but victorious.

Hex based tactical / open world strategic fantasy game around running a mercenary company. Low magic world (so more historical with monsters as opposed to fireballs) . well worth playing tho can be unforgiving at times

A great game for those willing to learn despite the difficulty. It's fantastic and has depth to it, despite initially simple mechanics. Each group of enemies has different characteristics and tactics, making them distinct from each other, requiring adaptive strategies.

Good game. Check out the Legends overhaul and make it even better.

The pro include the depth of systems at play: recruitment, trading, weapons & armor, character types. Lots of replayability and each playthrough can be satisfactorily long or short. The cons include some lack of polish to graphics, the steep learning curve (very worth it).

all the writing in the game is excelllent.

This game should be called, "We hate you, and will try to end your run whenever possible."

Its a punishing game. Tactics are not really a thing. Its almost entirely rng based but skewed on the computers side. Any other mode other then the easiest possible and tutorial modes will actively try to punish you. Take a caravan mission? suddenly 3-4 brigands parties will pop out. Looking for some ruins? Necro savants jump out the wood works and decimate your party. Find some ruins? Its filled with undead and a necromancer, which will simply raise the ones you kill even if you stand on them. One shot monsters, free actions points for enemies, insane prices for good gear. The enemy will almost always have the advantage on you. When it does not? It will get massive rng boosts so as to one shot at least one party member before it bows out. "Look Don Cheadle 69, im sure you are just bad, or over reacting." Touche dear reader, but let me ask you this. Do you like being punished for simply trying to play a game? If you go to the gym, do you want the equipment to hurt you? No probably not. I am sure there is some way to learn how to play the game. The tutorial will not really help you in that regards. Trial and error on a massive scale this game and youtube videos help somewhat. If you are looking to grind hours of your life away to get a decent party just to have your party wiped out by a game that is actively trying to end your run then this is the game for you. I will keep trying to play it, I will keep trying to win on any difficulty other then easy and tutorial mode. I am not going to hold my breath though.

Game is kinda bad but very addictive, really could be hundred ways better with village management and variety and customization but did get me hooked with bare bones as it is.

Looked like crap at a first sight, but won me over.
It's a simple game, as it must be since the campaigns are procedurally generated, but it has enough to offer to be entertaining and replayable.
Hard at first, even in the lower difficulties, gets a bit better when you get a decent sized squad with some experience to go along.
Every now and then, I come back, create a new Company and play for a while. Never gets old

It's fun, don't get me wrong. But my fucking god is it completely horseshit learning this game from scratch. You won't get access to anywhere near late game content in the first 40-50 hours of playing this game, and not because there's so much to do, but because your entire team will get wiped in one fight and brick your entire campaign. Seriously, any fight in this game where you lose any of your men is tantamount to a Pyrrhic victory. You'll spend ~600 crowns getting some shitty villager some weapons and armor so he isn't completely useless, only to complete a contract for ~300 crowns and get one of your men killed in the process. Boom, you're now DOWN 300 dollars for doing a contract.

It only gets worse the further into a campaign you get. God forbid your team actually gets GOOD, then you get cocky and take on a challenge, only for them all to get massacred and you have to start over from the absolute beginning; because you had the AUDACITY to try and actually DO any of the content you aren't used to.

I love the concept, the execution is shit. Play another game in the same genre.

Awesome low-fantasy, medieval strategy RPG that I have sunk nearly 3k hours into and streamed over a dozen long ass seasons of on my Youtube channel and still counting! Can't get enough, please make a sequel!!

Perfect little gem and definitely worth buying and playing...I really wonder when battle brothers 2 is coming out...I wanted more dlc's for this game but they never came so I am wondering will we ever get a 2 out of this...until then I am playing wartales if anyone needs to fix their itch in this style of gaming and have totally conquered this game like I have

Fun but the RNG is terrible. Their idea of "make it harder" is to literally handicap your hit rolls. Watching 7 men miss across all attacks with 80-95% hit chance is not bad rolling its fucking impossible as a probability. Shame was fun at one point.

Simply a great game. usually play it in background between multiplayer games. So much fun, and there's a lot of complexity to it! Definitely recommend.

Fantastic game, I keep coming back to it again and again. It has so much personality in such a deceptively simple interface. The gameplay loop is both lovely and addictive. If you enjoy tactical combat sims. This one is worth every penny.

After 200+ hours, I still haven't even scratched the surface of all the different campaign styles available. I highly suggest Ironman mode, it provides an extremely intense hardcore experience. Every swing of a sword is saved on the spot, and many injuries are permanent. Your squads best archer catches a stray rock from a vagabond's sling and loses an eye after 40 hours deep in a campaign. Suck it up and deal with it instead of save scumming before the fight. This removes the temptation to load when RNG completely screws you over as well. Makes every swing and and projectile extremely intense in combat. 10/10 would recommend to anyone who enjoys a challenging experience with infinite replayability.

Battle Brothers

An excellent, low-fantasy medieval turn-based tactics title where you are the commander of a wandering mercenary company, set in a procedurally-generated world filled with the trappings of German medieval legends and mythos. This may very well be the best turn-based tactics game I've seen in nearly a decade.

Battle Brothers /is/ difficult. It's not impossible, and there's definitely plenty of players who've mastered the title and know every little trick there is to know, and how to constantly win back-to-back fights, but that is not going to be your first experience with this game.

No, your first experience will likely be finishing up your tutorial, heading into a nearby town, maybe recruiting a brand new merc, two, or even three; then taking a contract to fight some brigands in the woods. Maybe, you even win! But soon enough, you realize you're bring trickled down. Each fight leaves you with a little less, and the money you're making from contracts isn't really covering your costs, and isn't leaving you with anything to spend on new gear. Soon enough, you find yourself in a losing contract where you're summarily cut down man-by-man until it's game over.

And I say this with an absolute certainty that this game is fun as hell. The combat is deep and well thought-out. While RNG plays a role, you'll always be trying to claw every little advantage you can onto your side, and you'll learn that sometimes- running away and taking a loss on a contract might be a hell of a lot better than losing a few too many of your top guys. Or, perhaps; you'll realize that having a few low-level jobbers around who might be considered 'expendable' is a better way of running your operation.

Regardless, as you progress further into the game the little depths and nuances become more and more apparent, and the breadth of game that is available to you starts to reveal itself. Sure, in your first in-game week or two, you'll just be slogging it out with barely-equipped brigand thugs, but soon enough you'll find yourself stumbling into vile creatures, powerful human soldiers, and perhaps; you might even find yourself face-to-face with some of the grand bosses of the title.

While Battle Brothers might be low-fantasy; it isn't /no-fantasy/. This isn't a "medieval mercenary sim." Sure, your party might be all humans, but you'll find yourself starting to encounter direwolves, witches with mind control, necromancers with undying hordes of zombies he can revive, skeleton soldiers rising from their graves in full armor, giants, dragons- it's all there.

Sure, the game doesn't look as flashy as some big-budget titles like the XCOM remakes, but it makes up for it's... Simpler appearance with an absolutely enthralling gameplay loop and excellent depth. Fights are fun, feel brutal, and the world (while each map may be proc-genned), is filled with wonderful writing in it's occasional events and colorful dialogue, and it does an excellent job in constantly scaling itself. The further you go along; it always feels like there's even more, newer stuff to fight.

Buy it, run your company into the ground- or success, and start all over again!

Battle Brothers is a game about difficulty. You're going to have to embrace getting killed, losing important characters, and having game ending set backs. Without the mountains, the gameplay itself is shallow and quite dull.

This game is pretty much turn based mount and blade, which is not really a good thing. Like M&B, I had fun for awhile, until i realized that there is nothing tactical about the game and every battle becomes pretty repetitive. The game starts every battle with your sides in two lines within almost one turns movement distance. Very tactical. I know I would deploy my guys right up there within range of archers. The terrain for each battle is generated upon entering the battle, so you may start the battle with your back against a hill. Did my guys march right down a hill and start battle at the foot of the hill my enemies are on. Very Tactical. The game kind of treats armor and shields as a second health bar, so it just becomes swinging attrition. The only bonus you get for placement of troops is a mild accuracy bonus. Mild. So you surround a guy with a shield and he somehow blocks every swing with a shield until the shield is destroyed. Then do the same for armor. Tactical as hell. Yes some weapons deal more damage to shields or armor, but ultimately it is still a very shallow "tactical" experience.

Tl;Dr: 9/10

Honestly, it is hard to describe how good this game is. It has it's flaws, but oh boy does the good out-way them.
The main flaw that gave it's 9/10 that currently has no fix at the moment of this comment, not even a mod fix. Is you cannot bait your enemies outside of combat. I expected that if I would run up a hill, while being chased and turned to attack I'd start with the height advantage, but the terrain is pure RNG. So even if you're on a hill, and the enemy is still on plains. They can (and have a higher chance to) have the higher ground. Which for the strategic players out there who consider the preparation to battle as important as the combat itself — sometimes even more important — such as I do, this hurts. As this would make this game go WAY beyond any other of its kind, 'till then, for my ironman runs, it's ALT+F4 until I get what I baited the enemy into.

Fun Game! Challenging, with a learning curve to it. Not crazy though. On the surface seems simple, but takes some time to learn the depth. I am still getting the hang of it. If you like turn based games, with depth, then this is the game for you.

Get lvl 1 bros and fight for Tier 2 weapons. You'll lose some or most of them.

Get level 1 bros WITH Tier 2 weapons and fight them up to higher level.

Use Higher level bros WITH Tier 2 weapons to get even BETTER weapons and armor. You'll lose some or most of them.

Use level 1 bros WITH EVEN BETTER weapons and armor to level up.

Use HIGHER LEVEL BROS WITH EVEN BETTER weapons and armor to get NAMED ITEMS.

Cycle repeat until you are challenging the biggest baddest enemies in the game.

The mod scene is awesome. The Legends overhaul greatly enhances the already thrilling experience, and the community is overall very welcoming.

One of the best games of all time IMO. If you like strategy and "your dudes" kind of games it's just the best.

This game is the equivalent of your abusive uncle that somehow always comes back to the family gathering. An average game looks like this:
-Start a new company with a cool name, a dope banner, and even some backstory in mind
-Go into the first town that has strangled trade routes, has been raided recently, and is somehow inhabited by exclusively anti-sellsword activists
-Get your first contract
-Get decapitated by a graverobber high on hyena acid

10/10 would visit the abusive uncle again.