My Top 10 Strategy Games For 2024

the fate of strategy games in the last couple years has kind of sucked City skylines 2 barely runs Fire Emblem engage was super mid and the next major RTS came out and failed which was completely unexpected but 2024 looks like a turning point there's a lot of really cool stuff coming up that's worth talking about so let's jump into my top 10ish upcoming strategy games the list order is fairly random with the exception of the final title which is the one that I am the most excited about let's begin first up is Frost Punk 2 with the original busting onto the scene in 2018 the frost Punk series is an alternate history post-apocalyptic late 1800s world where an enormous ice storm engulfed the planet the original game was a survival city Builder focused on creating and maintaining a society against the elements in Frost Punk 2 you've succeeded the small town has been built into an immense metropolis and it may be too big the game looks to expand the city's management aspects of the series while adding a large secondary Focus other factions vying for power they say they want to maintain the identity of being a city Builder but they're adding some pretty deep level politics into the game the original Frost Punk was incredibly atmospheric and that seems to be the case for frost Punk 2 as well they built a really cool world and expanding on it for the sequel looks great and the choice to make a city Builder where the city has already been built is incredibly fascinating though it does mean you probably should play Frost Punk one before going into the sequel I'm really looking forward to what comes from this I've always felt like the late game in most of this genre is a bit lacking you eventually hit a point where there just aren't many decisions to be made and the game sort of tapers off 11-bit Studios deciding to take what would normally be the end game and instead having it be the starting point is a very fascinating direction that has a lot of potential hopefully it manages to maintain the feeling of O Bleak and desperate fight for survival against the elements while they expand this more late game and faction Centric Direction most of the games in this list are either sequels that continue what their predecessors did or new titles that are looking to fill a specific Niche meanwhile stormgate is aiming to be everything everywhere all at once a cinematic single player experience with deep Co-op competitive ladder Esports and a fully fledged editor with custom Lobby system for user generated content and a focus on three versus three they're a little bit ambitious the setting is Aid apocalyptic Earth where a series of storm Gates have opened leading to a big demon Invasion that sci-fi humans are fighting off there's also an unannounced third faction that according to Reddit is probably anime wuss the competitive RTS Community seems pretty enthralled with frost Giants ideas for the game and their Kickstarter has raised a casual 1.8 million so far in addition to their sizable investments from other sources stormgate is by far the largest scale project here and they have the resources to make something pretty amazing but they also want to do literally everything and that sounds really hard we do know that they've invested an absurd amount into building the game and real 5 as well as their own proprietary Snow Play engine which does give me hope the only way to have this much breath is to have Rock Solid fundamentals I don't think that stormgate will officially launch this year but the alpha is already playable for many people and as time goes on the breadth of their invitees gets larger and larger you can sign up for stormgate on their website they also have a subreddit where you can tell them what type of anime waifu you think would be best for fighting off a demon Invasion horde defense games are really popular I sort of see games like are billions as The Next Step Up from the Tower Defense genre where instead of just building towers and defenses you need to construct the industry and bases capable of funding that defense cataclysm Mo looks like it takes that idea yet another step further asking why use a pre-built selection of towers and walls to defend when you can design your own the game has a demo on Steam for the first couple of levels so my thoughts are going to be largely based off of that and I think the game is really cool the first thing I noticed is that cataclysm even in the tutorial tells you to build stuff but never holds your hand it'll say stuff like get a mill put it near the trees and make sure there's a path to your base do the same for the stone build some houses make some walls and don't die but leaves the experimentation the placement and the optimization up to you I love that the game is a horde defense with a focus on Creative building and that creativity involves letting the player make stupid decisions and do things their own way from the get-go and uh speaking of stupid I was testing to see how badly the game would actually let me play by building the worst possible defenses I could and yeah it allows you to be so inventive and creative that I lost on the tutorial and I like that I don't think cataclysm is going to be able to hit the massive scale of attacks like they are billions but I'm excited to play around with the silly construction ideas maybe eventually find some unique strategies that are all my own and then finally I can beat the tutorial when the remake of age mythology was announced I got really really excited I got so excited that I'm not even going to give an overview of the game here because you can just watch this quick 3-hour 33 minute 33 second retrospective to fill yourself in before we continue the video don't worry I'll wait after the game was announced we've learned not a whole lot but there are a few things AG of Mythology retold is going to be a remake not a remaster so the entire game is being rebuilt from the ground up instead of being a fancy paint job and it's being done in the bang engine which is the same engine the game was initially made in I guess the goal is to maintain exactly the same feeling but it does feel a bit odd to remake a game in its own ancient engine when a ton of significantly more modern and easierto ous Alternatives exist even I can learn how to use unreal to make super basic RTS stuff in a few hours the remaster is being done by world's Edge Studio who did the Age of Empires 2 and three definitive editions I never played Age of Empires 3 but the definitive Edition for two is pretty universally regarded as fantastic and that gives me a lot of hope it took about 2 years from the announcement of Age 2 definitive before it released and if we assume a similar timeline for Age of Mythology retold then we're all idiots because game development is a nightmare of unforeseen pitfalls but we are coming upon 2 years since the announcement trailer so there is a chance that we get to later this year there are a few games in development that are pretty directly inspired by Command and Conquer and Tempest r is definitely the highest profile one set in a postor war II world where an electric plant called Tempest has started rapidly spreading across the Earth three factions VI for dominance over the ruined Planet well they claim it's three factions as of right now we only know about the global defense initi sorry Global Defense Force and the Tempest Dynasty both of these factions will have their own 11 Mission long campaigns from what we've seen of the factions they're all unique and some of their showcase designs are really interesting like this Tempest sphere which is a giant rolly ball of Doom that goes around crushing stuff I love weird unit designs like this and if we get more of it I'm going to be really happy aesthetically Tempest Rising looks good particularly once the larger units start coming out the glowing red Tempest Vines scattered around the map look fantastic and give the world an eerie and unique feeling to it Tempest Rising already had a small demo where we were able to play a mission from the gdf and the dynasty the core gameplay felt solid the units we saw had a nice variety of abilities and overall the control felt decent but things needed polish and to the team's credit they took the feedback and agreed They delayed the game's release to work on the issues which is something I wish I didn't have to praise but in the modern world of releasing half-baked garbage and claiming it'll get fixed later this is fantastic to see I'm really hoping Tempest Rises scratches that Command and Conquer itch that a lot of us have been feeling since EA destroyed the franchise and turned it into a mobile game for most of the games on this list I have a pretty pretty decent idea of what we're going to get out of them but Outpost Infinity Siege is absolutely ridiculous and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it Outpost is a blend of first-person shooter base Builder and Tower Defense where you build an epic Fortress and then grab your weapon and fight along side the defenses the idea is awesome and the game looks like it's going all in on making the scale absurd specific details in English are a bit lacking the devs are not native English speakers but it looks like Outpost is going to be mostly a single player focused game with an online co-op mode the vibe seems to be traveling from planet to planet deploying your big defensive thing and then holding off hordes of enemies the game excites me because there aren't a ton of strategy games that use the firstperson perspective it gives me Battle Zone Vibes Battle Zone was an old school RTS and shooter and tank piloting mashup thing from the late '90s it was a really cool game that was ahead of its time it was one of the secret treasures to be rented out from Blockbuster and if Outpost Infinity Siege is anything like like that then it's going to be a good time I think Outpost is probably the most ambitious game on the list mixing FPS and Tower Defense while getting it to work in a way that feels good to play requires a development team with a deep understanding of both genres but it looks like the type of game that if it works is going to make a lot of unique and memorable experiences dust front looks absolutely wild not like the mechanics are crazy but look at it worms I think the game describes itself as a mix of command and conquer with a campaign of global Conquest from games like dawn of War dark Crusade or the total war series dust front is single player only with a major focus on this campaign the game's being made by a solo developer with the name of RTS demon he's been working on the project for almost 8 years and has finally announced it a few months ago and that's about what we know I don't really know what to make of dust front but I can say that the art style is already iconic I wish I could say more but honestly I respect a solo developer's desire to not spend spend a bunch of time on media and instead just make the game so we'll let him cook the next game is a bit hard for me to talk about simply because I'm just not qualified to do it compared to others the home World Series has been around for a long time now it is beloved for its large scale space battles and I never really got into it it was one of those games that I always knew that I would like and then just never played you know how it is we've all been there fortunately home World 3 looks like a really good jumping on point the game looks sweet the scope and scale of Home World 3 looks insane in addition to the big Starship battles using all three axes of space the maps are covered in these huge mega structures that actually come into play as physical objects making a Space game that actually has what's effectively terrain instead of being mostly an empty void home World 3 looks like it's going to be one of the biggest budget strategy games coming out this year and if the gameplay matches what we've seen in the teasers then we're in for a treat before we talk about the game that I'm most excited about I have a couple of special mentions games that I had a hard time fitting into the actual rules but I want to talk about anyway first up is sins of a solar Empire 2 sins 1 was a very popular intro level 4X game lacking the menus within menus of other Empire Builder games like Europa universalis and trading it in for a bit faster paced gameplay sins uses a Sci-Fi setting to tread the line between RTS and Forex gameplay the sequel sins of a solar Empire 2 has been in Alpha and beta access for a while now as an epic game store exclusive what they want you to do is pay for access to the alpha and beta and then you're kind of locked in to the epic game store launcher when the game releases epic is paying them to remain exclusive for a while the money is being used to develop the game and once the contract expires it'll be available as a full product on Steam the thing is at a glance sins of a solar Empire 2 doesn't look like a huge departure from the original it kind of looks like a remake the game follows the same general flow of building a fleet moving around a solar system fighting Pirates conquering and colonizing planets and eventually finding the opponents and beating them up at this point in development the factions feel pretty identical to their predecessors and that's not great sin of a solar Empire doesn't have any sort of story mode to differentiate and it seems like most of the value in the game is coming from small changes a fancy new engine some cleaner UI and a system where instead of being static entities the colonizable planets now orbit around their host star at first I was honestly a bit unimpressed with this direction but as I started mulling it over more the potential of some absolutely wild plays seems pretty interesting with the orbital mechanic sins of a solar Empire was already a very solid game to begin with and maybe this level of spice will make it worth it but only time will tell my second special mention actually goes to a game that came out last year but it's really good and nobody's talking about it so I'm going to break the rules a bit so I can last train home is incredible the game follows a group of Czechoslovakian legionnaires initially fighting alongside their Russian allies in the first world war but now they find themselves caught in the fry as the Empire collapses into Civil War unable to find their way home through the West the legionaries must instead make the agonizing trip east across the entirety of Russia to reach vlat vasto where they can find a ship home taking inspiration from the very real Revolt of the czechoslovak Legion last train home feels like a cross between the American classic Oregon Trail and XCOM there's a constant scramble to get as many resources as possible upgrade your train and care for your soldiers making your way home takes time Fuel and food and as you progress you find yourself facing off against the increasingly powerful Red Army as they gain an advantage over the whites in the Civil War and become more coordinated all while preparing to tackle the nightmare hellscape that is Siberia the game isn't perfect a lot of the management feels a little bit clunky and the cover system can be frustrating in to deal with but last train home absolutely Nails the miserable desperate Vibe of a band of outcasts stuck in a foreign nation that is collapsing around them I'm going to have to make a full video on this game because I can't do it justice here but if you want to grow attached to a group of legionaries only to watch them freeze to death in Siberia because you got greedy and decided to buy a gun instead of more fuel then last train home is the game for you it is time for the game that I am most excited about welcome to dwarf while Tempest Rising may be a spiritual successor to command and Conquer dorf is red alert's spirit animal everything is Big everything is absurd everything is creative seriously look at this and look at this and this everything in this game is ridiculous to the tenth power the hardest part of this video is figuring out what absurd things to flash on the screen because every single Le shot in this game's trailers continue to pile more and more insanity and the most crazy part is that this is an indie game being made by two people obviously being an indie game means development is going to be slow but it also unshackles them from what I've gathered dwarf isn't trying to make a balanced multiplayer experience they don't have a publisher trying to force them to build the next great esport instead they're going back to the roots of RTS the ridiculous over-the-top rule of cool above everything else and I for one am glad to see it oh and on top of that they're making the resource system be one where you have to extract refine and then deliver refined Parts directly to production structures so not only is this Red Alert 2 on steroids but throw in some factorio because these devs get it I know I'm supposed to do the oh well guys you got to temper your expectations it's just a development team of two people they might not be able to realize all of their I don't care okay listen the game looks awesome this game looks like it was made specifically for me and I I am so excited you're not supposed to do conclusions on YouTube anymore because it ruins your watch time so we're done watch the age mythology video again bye

Channel: GiantGrantGames

Views: 724,581

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Id: hKCs8jAwnPM

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 17 2024