Battle Brothers

highly recommended, large amounts of build/gameplay variety and extremely replayable while accommodating a wide range of desired difficulty levels

This game is fun but even on beginner settings it will beat you absolutely senseless. And you will keep coming back for more. Bc for some reason you keep telling yourself you're different, special, and super smart. But it's all luck anyways. All you can do is try to mitigate risk. Good luck fucker. Hope you learn to enjoy the suffering. Art and writing are S-tier however.

This is easily one of my favourite games. Don't let it's simplicity fool you, this game hates you and wants you to die ! Not a game for people who like " safe places" or can't tolerate losing. You will lose, and often. Like real life not every campaign you play will be fair but nonetheless this is a brilliant game. It's well thought out and full of flavour. Just don't expect to win.

the game itself is not bad, the ridiculous ass rng is bullshit. 60 percent hit chance is actually 10 percent. The amount of times youll lose guys due to missing 8 70% hit chance attacks in a row is astronomical. Display the real hit chance and not some fake "60-70 percent"bullshit because thats not true. editing to add on, I have a decently beefy PC and multiple times when I win a battle, the game freezes up completely before any autosaves forcing me to waste time redoing the whole ass fight again. Piss poor optimization.

6/10

The game is alright. It's worth its price. It's fun managing your squad, and that's definitely the high point of the gameplay.

There's a lack of polish to every other aspect of the game that hurts the experience.
- The writing isn't bad, not at all, but a lot of it will be repeated word for word many times throughout a single playthrough.
- The outcome of any fight is more dependent on RnG than any tactical decisions you make, which is intensely unsatisfying even when it plays in your favor. It's a frustrating mechanic in any game, and it is pushed to an extreme in this one. (XCOM2 uses it well, as an example.) This is not a complaint about difficulty, but the way in which it's implemented.
- The missions become tedious and repetitive quickly, with little variety.
- The locations have little variety, and none of them are interesting or memorable. The map is just not pleasant to look at, and you spend a significant amount of your time looking at it, it's forgivable but unfortunate.

Even at its best, it's just okay, but if you love the genre you probably won't regret picking it up.

It has it's faults, like having to fall into the same weapon strategies to defeat certain foes, but it's a cracking turn based battle system.

*THIS IS A REVIEW FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE ALL MODS INSTALLED*.
What you will get out of this game is hours and hours of playing time but you will need to start on beginner difficulty.
The graphics are hard to get used to at first and before you get a rhythm going you may have to look at some guides and play the game again and again before you get the hand of it. HOWEVER the grind is worth it once you have a roster of 12 brothers and have defeated your first endgame crisis.

This game seems to get better as you go along but also much harder, the quests get more difficult and locations spawn on the map which seem near impossible. What you need to do is get a lot of money, get a few legendary weapons which can be found from difficult locations and champions (which spawn randomly on the world map) and level up your brothers, (also be sure to have substitutes). Also SAVE YOUR GAME AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, use multiple save files everywhere you go so that you do not regret it.

This is my first play-through of the game and I am still on my first world I have chosen beginner difficulty (which is actually more like normal difficulty) and I have been having a great time. In fact I have played this game so much recently that I have not played another game in the past month. Thank you devs for this masterpiece.

Brutal, challenging, and addictive. Don't play your first campaign on ironman, the game autosaves to the beginning of your last battle - The better for learning to fight whatever just kicked the shit out of your guys.

Can be quite challenging and difficult to learn, but for tactics fans, this game produces a lot of very satisfying moments. The game strikes a great balance with progression, giving the player a great power trip as you advance your team from a bunch of weak nobodies to a team of experienced veterans with excellent gear, but keeps the challenge level high enough to remain engaging. Especially with expansions, the game offers a pretty high degree of replayability. Would recommend to all strategy/tactics fans.

Very top tier game, it's managed to capture a very unique niche corner. Gonna be honest the only con I really have for this game is that the devs decided to abandon it to move onto other projects. What we have is what we have forever apparently. Which is a decent amount, and the modding community for this game is extensive so there's that for those interested.

It's a very good game. I've only put about 7 hours into it, so I can't speak to it's depth. But I'm already thinking about getting some of the DLC. I bought the game on sale, I don't know if I could recommend it for full price yet, though. But I do recommend the game!

So I wasn't sure what to expect. The game play was difficult at first to learn. There wasn't much in the way of information on strategy, especially for resource management, combat, band composition, etc. But....., as I played I figured a lot of it out as I went. Definitely need to play on beginner mode to start off. the only down side I've seen so far is the repetitive nature of the play and missions. I wish the map was much larger and provided much more in depth game play. It's a little limited in that regard.

A bit rough around the edges. Doesn't present itself well at first. But this warrior has a keen eye and all the potential in the world. This is a tactics game with hidden elegance and subtle strategies.

It won't wow you right away like X-com. Don't go in thinking you can compete on Veteran Ironman right off the bat, even if you've mastered other tough tactics games (I did, to my peril.)

Take it slow. Save often and reload if you need to. The variety of battles and strategies are as strong as I've seen in a game of this type. The thrill of surviving a tough battle with all your brother-in-arms intact will be your reward if you've got the patience.

Very nice addictive game,.. if you like turn based tactical strategy buy it

It's... so good... SO, SO GOOD. You can really appreciate how well tought everything the more you play it. How you discover little strategies, and how to beat whatever random smuck wiped you out last run. Distinct enemies actually matter and play differently. Just in the same faction (Undead) you have. Skeletons, who always move last but won't tire out: They are all with shileds and will play the long game to eventually tire your brothers. Zombies: Easy to kill, but they are a lot, and I mean A LOT. They respawn if you don't decapitate them. Ghosts: Stand in the back and spam fear so your brothers flee. Without being able to control them, they're as good as dead. Die in one hit. The catch? You have to take the horde of zombies separating you WHILE they spam fear. Not only that, you have a fixed 5% chance to hit them with ranged, forcing you to go close.

You see them, you die slowly and horribly... and then you learn. Skellys have shields? No matter, axes break them and flails ignore their defense bonuses. Zombies respawn? Not if you use cleavers, that always decapitate enemies. The ghosts make you unable to control troops? Go from 2 sides, since their attack is a kind of cone that can't hit everything at once. Also use the skill RALLY to give morale to your fleeing brothers. THE WHOLE GAME IS LIKE THIS.

The bad: This game is NOT for everyone. Losing company after company hurts, specially when you started to like your bros. They can get permanent injuries, wich almost always means you have to dispose of them anyways. I wish we could treat them, even if costly. It's sad to have to push them away and you'll slowly de-humanize them, like disposable tools. I don't want to play like that man.
The other problem is skills. While Bros are clearly NOT made equal, everyone has access to the same skill tree. Sadly, some skills are REAL bad in comparison with others. Some examples are Brawny, that should really give you more that what it gives, and that the best skill that you could pair it with, the light armor expert one, specifically states that doesn't apply. I think buffing these "low tier skills" would do marvels for the build creativity.
The other is the weapon expert skills. You basically specialize your bro in one type specifically. The problem is that some weapons, like bows and crossbows, are usable in only certain scenarios (skellys are almost inmune to long range for example) and a lot of times it's best to just use the type of weapon the enemy is specifically weak to. This is kinda aliviated by the fact that you don't always know what's jumping at you in the middle of the forest at 3 am, but still.

So yeah, absolute marvel of a game, losing is fun, buff ranged and low tier skills please. Fuck you Hoggart.

This game is the most challenging tactical RPG in steam. There are many DLCs, and even though they add a bunch of content and mechanics to play with that feel like should be in the base game. buying them doesnt change much of the experience. The reason I am giving it a negative review is because the game cannot handle itself. This game is 32 bit .exe (only 2 giga rams), which after you spend sometime in your save you add more stuff for the game to carry until it reaches it is limit(this does not happen to everyone, it happened to me and many others, and no I was not playing with mods). When it reaches it`s limit it starts leaking memory causing glitched textures in the battle field and occasional lag drops until it finally corrupts the save making you lose all your progress instantly. Thankfully the community made fixes for this issue that makes the game perform way better than it could originally, but the fact that you need to download mods to play a game is unacceptable. Still a great 95 out of 100 experience.

i am still bad but this is one of my favorites

Difficult for sure. Once you get a handle just superb combat system and so fun to replay over and over.

Save scum and play beginner for awhile. Big learning curve. The game is hard, but learning what the challenging parts are compared to the easier parts will make the game possible to play.

This game is fun but my sole complaint is the high number of 'critical exception' crashes I've randomly had which always seem to happen during long battles (e.g. noble war fights) and because there's no saving during battles, I have to restart the game and fight the battle again from scratch which is enormously frustrating and really ruins my player experience. This appears to be down to my choice of antivirus software so I can't really blame the devs for that though.

Hard to describe. But don't let the initial simplicity of the game fool you. It's deep fun and just very unique.

This game SUCKS!
A pretty art style doesn't make a good game.
Your mercenaries are weak and tucker out within a few actions.
Archers on your side are useless.
The tutorial refuses to teach you how to play.
The RNG will screw you over in more ways than one.
STAY AWAY from this horrible plague-carrying piece of diseased cow fuck!

This game would be good but the RNG bias towards the AI even on the easiest difficulty makes this game unplayable. I wouldn't waste your money. they brag that this is a difficult game, but without the RNG it wouldn't be. you can have a 99% chance to hit and 9 out of 10 times it will miss, the inverse for the AI.

It's a good game. It knows what it's going for, and it nails its target. It really hits the gritty vibe well.

I know I'm a scrub, but I wish it had more ways to tune the difficulty. Ways to adjust the combat difficulty in different ways would be nice, but I'm more focused on the economic side. I'd personally like to be able to run around and have difficult, tactical battles without having to worry as much about the other stuff. So being able to adjust stuff like food consumption rate, job availability rates, etc. would be awesome.

>play the tutorial
>nothing is explained

why even make a tutorial at this point then???

they dont even have keybiding in game, instead its posted in forum for some reason + the UI is pretty bad too, it just feels bad to play it....

Fantastic game, hope the devs give it some more love, the mod community is great though.

I got a few hours in and i gotta say, I still have no idea what I'm doing.
10/10 there's nothing quite like watching the company you've been putting
together for the last 8 hours get hunted down and murdered by tiny green children riding rabid wolves.

Very engaging action/tactical RPG about managing a mercenary company, where losing is fun, and stories around your band of warriors form naturally through gameplay. Lots of variation in gameplay, and builds, with good enemy AI. World-building wise, it has a good mix of low fantasy elements with "gritty" elements of medieval society without feeling over-the-top or like it's trying too hard to be edgy.

Tough and punishing, you WILL lose units, it WILL happen a lot. Start on beginner for the love of god.

Very addicting, with great depth in its gameplay and well crafted world

Fun game, great challenge and diverse playstyles abound

actually i bought this game a long time ago and after 3.5 hours i quit,i didn't write a review because i thought devs could've tweak the things for at least beginner difficulty with time but ofc i was the naive one thinking a beginner difficulty should be for BEGINNERS... the only reason i quit was the ranged combat btw. the melee combat is actually fine because you often get %50+ hit chance and you actually feel that %50 chance is fair, you don't miss too often with melee weapons. but the ranged combat omg its mind numbingly awful,let me explain why

on early game you'll get MAXIMUM %45 hit chance with your ranged bros and thats only if they are good(stat wise) and got some good perks otherwise you'll get stupid numbers like %5-%9 majority of time and those are on DAYTIME btw its even more awful with the night time accuracy penalty. the entire early game ranged combat is like this: miss,miss,miss,hit 1 time for a miniscule dmg,miss,miss,miss rinse and repeat. is this sound fun to you? %45hit chance my shoes, even with %59 hit chance you are missing left and right in this game. and early game is not 3.5 hours btw, i told to myself how long this missing charade lasts anyway so i've watched couple of guides on Youtube and people were missing their shots for 10+ hours non stop until they get good bros which is a huge grind...

so how to get fun in this game? Grind your butt for hours to get good bros and then pray to the rng gods that you won't miss %75+ hit chances with your stupid ranged bros. if you guys watched the movie "Men in Thights" there is character named Blinken and your ranged bros are basically him. %6 hit chance on a point blank range, wow just wow.

yeah the game has 99 things the developer did right but this one thing makes the game a chore to play and thats why i can't recommended it to anybody who hates stupid rigged rng mechanics like me. X-com is probably the biggest regret purchase i've got on my entire life and this game seriously close to that. its such a shame tho because this could've been fixed at least for the beginner difficulty but these developers are thinking that rolling a dice and missing %99 of the time is fun and challenge...

You are getting what you've asked for, and a lot more, 0 reasons to not invest your time into this gem.

Amazingly immersive game, world feels alive, combat feels very tense through great audio. Balance feels great, armor works, team composition matters a lot. A lot of great tiny decisions that just make sense that would otherwise sour the experience. Great game well worth the price.

One of my all time favorites, especially for an immersive open world medieval sandbox. Better captures the feeling I was hoping to get out of Bannerlord with a mercenary struggling rising up to fighting tense tactical battles, just play Hedge Knight start for the main character vibe

I have tried to give this game multiple tries. Each time, I get frustrated by the game design philosophy of the devs, where you are presented with options that are either a waste of your time or will completely ruin your run. The game does not present this information to you intuitively, you are just supposed to know that you can't fight certain enemy types until you get a high-level party. Or that sometimes the arena battles will make you do a fight that's wildly more difficult than any arena battle you've done so far, without any warning.

Great game, with decend chalange and good mechanics. Btw the soundtrack especially the barbarian one is awesome

This is the greatest game I have played in years. Open world xcom fantasy. So much fun.

Before you buy, bear in mind that this game is VERY hard and subject to a lot, perhaps not always fair, RNG. But if you like inflicting pain to your mind as well as your body this should be a 10/10 experience.

This game has become unplayable. I used to play it years ago when it was released, and it was great! Now, you start with almost no money, abysmal armor, no weapons. You get only the lousy missions where you have to crawl in a forest or on top of a mountain for days looking for a non-existent place until your funds run out, or until direwolves attack. I played this on beginner three times recently, and in all games I lost from the first battle to unbeatable enemies. They reworked the balance and made it unplayable.

3 crashes, broken textures and after the last crash, the autosave is now constant crash on load so i have to go back to my other save which was 6 hrs ago... Would 100% not recommend in the state the game is at the moment.

very fun. haven't gotten close to beating the game. Maybe got midway through when all my brothers get massacred. very fun though. Especially with the different starts you can do. Oathtakers, peasant militia, beast slayers and lone wolf are my favorite ones so far.

After spending 75 hours with "Battle Brothers," I wanted to enjoy the experience of managing a mercenary company in its richly designed world. The game's atmosphere and art style are commendable, creating a setting that is both immersive and appealing.

However, despite the time invested, I found myself not achieving much and feeling increasingly frustrated. Even on the beginner difficulty, the game is punishingly hard. The early game is especially unforgiving, often placing you in situations that feel nearly impossible to overcome. This steep difficulty curve can be discouraging for new players trying to find their footing.

The missions lack variety and quickly become repetitive, making progression feel like a tedious grind. Traversing the expansive map during caravan or courier missions is slow and unengaging, which made it difficult to stay focused on the game.

While "Battle Brothers" has a lot of potential with its compelling concept and world design, the excessive difficulty and repetitive gameplay overshadow these strengths. If you're considering this game, be prepared for a challenging and oftentimes frustrating experience.

Gotta love this Dogshit game. "Just get good"
Yup, gotta love it when my bro has a 95% chance to hit and misses 4 times in a row!
Then enemy AI with 10% chance hits me 3 times and I die to the wonder world of RNG.

Games are supposed to be fun, and man is this one that. I don't care that I have an invincible squad I've played for "1500 days" on easy, with unkillable mercs. Sometimes I just have to go back and wreck havoc on anything I wish. Ahhh... I've played quite a bit, the replay value is extremely high. If you have fun getting slaughtered due to a difficult game this is definitely for you, if you want to "learn" how to overcome seemingly impossible odds try BB. If you like breaking a sweat over a turn based RPG, this may do you right. If you eventually play a game and have love tooling around a fantasy world as human armor clad gods, it'll take a while, but yeah Battle Bros. Good stuff.
Here's to 100 days of save-scumming fun! However you want to do it. Try to start with unexplored map, iron man. Either way, may your daggers slip through the armor you wear later.
P.S. Base game is easily worth it, so are DLC's. Added content is really great. Last one free from Devs, this game is so under-hyped.

RNG trash. so hardcore. wow, much oldschool. rolling a dice is not a game you really play, you are more of an observer.

5 crossbow shots to kill a wolf?
raising a shield and aiming spear at your enemy leaves you exhausted in 3 rounds?

alright, people love this game. i don't and i don't get it.

good game, imo, release a game with lots of skill builds, people use 1 maybe 2 adding archers, don't hide the content that is bit lacking and wiki necessary to understand tf there is once you reach lvl 11? around 11. Better quests, classes instead "origins" aka you start in different places but pretty much the same. Explained lore not DS style needing wikis all the time. Release that, get rich. Still this game got cool mods and just vanilla is dope, next time please fk gamepad support.

The pros just nearly outweigh the Cons of this game. The combat is fun, the time period and low fantasy theme is amazing, and the idea/concept of the game is great. The armor is customizeable and the enemy variety is super great!

The single con is the RNG engine they built into the game. They claim "It's been tested by third parties to be proven completely random RNG" but it's very obviously not. You will have battles where once you start every single ranged enemy on the map will hit you with 100% accuracy before you even start the battle and half of your men are already dead. You reload the save and the same thing happens over and over and over and over. It's kind insane how they claim its "Random" when the AI enemies nearly never miss their attacks, but as a player you miss over 60% of your attacks easily. I've had hits that are 95% hit chance miss several times in a row, while the low ranked loin cloth enemy walks up to me and stabs me 8 times in a row and kills me. There is clearly a problem with how the rolls are made (I believe it's because the random numbers are generated straight up on a scale from 1 to 100 instead of randomly choosing positive hit integers on the scale for the players to score a positive hit. So for instance if you have a 40% chance of hitting, you will score a positive hit on numbers 1-40. That's great and all but the game makes you roll super high numbers like 90% of the time. You'll be rolling 90s constantly, again I don't know how that's random when clearly 90+ rolls is a favorite of the game. Or the game just cheats for fun. Either way XCOM's random hits are more accurate, and that's saying something.

If you play the game with mods, it's a little more balanced. But just prepare to reload saves quite a bit.

Battle Brothers is constant management of risk/reward. How will you turn a bunch of farmers and rat-catchers into an elite mercenary company? Battle Brothers plays like Mount and Blade or Starsector with turn base combat on a grid based map. Unforgiving by nature, Battle Brothers may turn many people off due to its learning curve.

Let me start by saying if you are looking for a Fire Emblem game, you have found it. You are going to need to roll at least 100 times to find a good map seed but once you do you get transported to Middle Earth and what could appear to be a shallow experience is actually a never ending story. When you start the game you are in a race against the clock and you must quickly recruit, outfit, supply, pay and train a company of battle brothers. You have to build a good team as fast a possible because the game gets more difficult after you have been playing for awhile. Major events will happen like a greenskin invasion, wars between the kingdoms and undead scourges. There are also hundreds of random little events that can occur if you are in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. Each brother you encounter will have a different story and build. The game continually gives you just the right amount of vague story information to keep you engaged and it never really ends. It is easy for me to get carried away and pretend like I am actually playing a LOTR game or Dragon Age. You cannot buy a caravan/warehouse or conquer a town like in Mount and Blade but in every other feature Battle Brothers is a better game. Something simple like unlocking the people who sit around the fire in your camp is really satisfying and it is hard to explain why.

Occasionally I get the itch to come back to this game because a solid 85% of it is best in its genre, but then I remember that these guys put Alps in the game and it reminds me they can't be trusted to design anything ever again without adult supervision.