Mutant Year Zero Road To Eden Coop

[Jacinda Saleeby]

Strategygames is an enormous genre in PC gaming, with real-time, turn-based, 4X and tactics games all flying the same flag to stake their claim as the one true best strategy game. Our list of the best strategy games on PC covers the lot of them. We like to take a broad view here at RPS, and every game listed below is something we firmly believe that you could love and play today. You'll find 30-year-old classics nestled right up against recent favourites here, so whether you're to the genre or want to dig deep for some hidden gems, we've got you covered. Here are our 50 best strategy games for 2023.

In our list, we've mainly focused on strategy games about commanding troops of some kind, so if it's settlement or colony sim games you're after, then have a read of our best management games list. A handful of strategy games here do involve a bit of building, but there's no football management or spaghetti junctions. And if your favourite doesn't make the cut, please know it was number 51. If nothing else, it gives you a good excuse to tell us all about it in the comments below. You can also check out our readers' favourite strategy games of all time as well.

Finally, we've selected some of our top strategy highlights in the video above, too, if you prefer lists with a bit more audio visual flair. Our video ranking doesn't match this written list exactly, all told, but they're all games we'd recommend playing in a heartbeat.

As soon as Amplitude announced their big historical 4X game, it was inevitable that comparisons would be drawn to the Civilization series. But Humankind is so much more than just a riff on Sid Meier's classic strategy franchise. Yes, there are several different technological ages to play through, but the most tantalising aspect of Humankind is how you can graft different cultures together to accumulate all manner of different perks and effects. Onscreen, that can mean having Japanese pagodas nestling right up to Mayan pyramids and Italian opera houses. In all, there are one million potential civilisation builds in Humankind, and it is absolutely thrilling.

At times, it's almost more puzzle game than 4X, giving it a distinctly different flavour to Civilization. With so many different combinations to sift through and take into account, it can be a little overwhelming in early playthroughs, but the way you can redefine your entire game plan on the fly, pivoting money-making dynamos into diplomatic powerhouses and research giants is also Humankind's greatest masterstroke. If you're tired of Civ, this is a very worthy heavyweight alternative.

Company Of Heroes made World War II seem like new territory. It manages to marry the humanity of Band of Brothers with the ingredients of an RTS. Even as you send fresh troops into battle, replacing a squad who just died on a fool's errand of your own making, Company Of Heroes makes you believe that every soldier counts for something. That's partly due to the detailed depictions that the Essence Engine make possible, but it's also down to the careful pacing of the missions.

Has any RTS game handled both the calm and the storm as well as Company Of Heroes? Even when combat begins, there's usually a peppering of shots toward cover before casualties occur, and Relic ensure that you have time to react as a situation develops. Even though those soldiers are just pixels on a screen, don't be surprised if you find yourself making tactical choices that ensure their survival rather than the quickest possible route to success. The newest entry in the series, Company Of Heroes 3 is also well worth a look, too, but for us, the original still just about pips it to the post. Just.

1992's Frank Herbert-adapting Dune 2 is the great grandparent of the real-time strategy game as we know it now, but a pleasant play experience today it most certainly is not. That's where Dune 2 Legacy comes in, an open source project that reworks Westwood Studio's Dune 2 into a new framework, giving it a more modern interface and graphical sensibilities.

The world has, of course, moved on since Houses Atreides, Harkonen and Ordos first went to war for control of the Spice of Arrakis, but a combination of straightforwardness, excellent vehicle, creature designs and devious treats such as the now-rare likes of stealing enemy buildings lends it a timelessly lurid charm. For a more modern Dune experience, Dune: Spice Wars is currently shaping up very nicely indeed in early access.

DEFCON is the strategy game most likely to make you wake up in a cold sweat. It's an abstract simulation of thermo-nuclear war, in which the tension rises along with the DEFCON level, and frantic deals lead to bitter betrayal. It's a game in which people are reduced to numbers (and ashes). Scores are measured in megadeaths inflicted and, in the default setting, causing a megadeath on an opponent's territory is worth two points while losing a million citizens in your own territory only loses one point. The value of life.

The first of many Warhammer games on our best strategy games list, 40K: Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters takes that classic XCOM formula, pumps it full of Gears Tactics protein shakes and chucks it into deep space for some dark fantasy plague-stomping. You play as a team of beefy Grey Knights in this chaotic tactics game, working to rid the galaxy of the terrible Bloom, which is slowly being spread across the stars by the agents of everyone's favourite god pal Nurgle. While cover still plays an important role here, these Knights play best when you're slicing off appendages up close and personal thanks to its Precision Targeting system, making them about as far as you can get from XCOM's squishy humans. The Bloom is constantly throwing new battle conditions into the mix, too, with enemies mutating and developing extra traits and buffs every couple of turns. If variety is the spice of life, this will definitely make your eyes water.

It doesn't let up between missions, either. Away from combat, there's also a compelling strategy layer of fixing up your damaged ship and researching further boons and bonuses, giving you plenty to think about on and off the battlefield. It's also just received the brilliant Duty Eternal expansion, which adds a giant mech lad to your party and lots more besides. Altogether, Chaos Gate - Daemonhunters is a thrilling mix, and most importantly, pokes enough fun at its own lore to make it approachable to non-Warhammer heads as well.

One of the best superhero games you'll likely ever play, Marvel's Midnight Suns is frothy, fast-paced fun. Made by the same minds behind XCOM and XCOM 2, Midnight Suns brings its hero characters out from cover and puts them front and centre, its card-based battle system and interactive combat arenas offering up loads of tactical opportunities for proper comic book power moments. It also has a substantial RPG element to dig into between missions, giving you a window into what drives these superheroes, and what other issues they're dealing with, as the story progresses. Even if the MCU at large has ground you down over the years, Midnight Suns' playful writing makes these characters feel fun and fresh again, too.

But it's the card battles that really make Midnight Suns sing, and gradually honing your individual hero decks into the ultimate goon crushing machine satisfies all the same synapses in your brain as giving your XCOM squad the perfect loadout. Crucially, every hero has been designed to make you feel cool and powerful, with brilliantly choreographed moves and specials that amp up the smug factor to no end. It feels good biffing Hydra drones into cranes and seething hellpits, as it should do when you're playing as a bunch of powerful superheroes. That doesn't mean Midnight Suns is a pushover, though. Far from it, as its waves of swelling enemy ranks can attest. But that feeling of finally clearing them all out, while also dropping a crane on their head and shoving the rest into exploding barrels and live electrical boxes? It'll make you want to pump your own fists straight into the air.

Arguments over which of Creative Assembly's historical battlefield sims is the best are a time-honoured tradition among strategy game obsessives, and you'll probably find a lot of those discussions tend to conclude with 2011's Total War: Shogun 2. In our own discussions, we concluded that 2017's Warhammer II and 2019's Three Kingdoms were the bestest best Total War games you can play today, but Shogun 2 is still one of Creative Assembly's all-time classics.

Set during Japan's warring states period, you are put in the samurai war flip-flops of one of the many warlords struggling for control of the islands during the 16th Century, and it gets hectic. The AI is well-tuned on both the strategic map and on the tactical battlefields (not always the case in Total War), and the campaign is paced with shrewd finesse: if you throw your weight around too much, the Shogun himself will paint a target on your head, and everyone will come at you like estate agents after a plate full of money. Thanks to this built-in tipping point, progression is a matter of careful calculation and time-biding rather than a wild land grab, and political thinking is just as important as good generalship. All this, for a game that's ostensibly about lining up troops on a battlefield and doing big stabs, feels somehow incredibly generous.

Wyvern, armoured bears, shield maidens, draugr: on face of things, the viking mythology-styled Northgard is a return to the thematic outlandishness of late 90s/early-noughties real-time strategy, but it combines that joyful anything-goes quality with thoughtful, almost simulatory paths onward from build'n'bash tradition. There's a whole food ecosystem, the regular arrival of winter turns it into a survival game of sorts, you can trade with monsters and your choice of which clan you control affects your play style on a level far beyond mere unit options. It's very much a building game as well as a war game, but does a stand-up of job of keeping things lean despite how many plates it spins.

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