Burden of Command™

A very fun but tough game!

This is exactly the type of game I have been waiting for. Hard, Harsh Strategic game that does not care about you or your feelings. It's up to you to see it to the end, and it's up to you to bring home the soldiers following your orders. This is the game that you will remember from time to time after you have completed it.

I have no doubt that many people enjoy this game. I found it a complete disappointment, particularly because I stuck it out long enough to not be eligible for a refund. It's too abstract for my taste. I'm not going to trudge through the long, drawn out, not-able-to-skip-to-next-screen tutorial to get the exact quote, but somewhere in there they explain their abstract system by claiming that you cant really shoot and eliminate units in WW2 combat, that's unrealistic. You have to get them to either run away or surrender (these aren't divisions, they are squads and leaders). I dont think I've ever facepalmed so hard, it was that ridiculous. The tutorial is decent at showing you the various movement/activation/command aspects of the game, but get ready for lots of story, videos you cant skip past and are just flavor, and just a long and convoluted process (the 2.2 hours of my play time) to show you a few basic things to get you started (maybe 15 minutes worth of ACTUAL learning). I didnt waste my time starting the single campaign choice again but I suspect you have to go through the tutorial again, considering I never selected tutorial just campaign and it went straight to the tutorial. I hope not, for the sake of those who enjoy the game. It's just too abstract. I was hoping for something more like a turn-based version of close combat, where command matters and between battles you can customize your units with weapon upgrades and add replacements. Something along those lines. Instead it's more like a board game like Risk or Diplomacy or even Chess (Undaunted comes to mind as well). These require thought and strategy and complex movement rules and choices, but they arent really combat or war games. They are move-your-game-pieces boardgames and we call the pieces combat units for flavor. Disappointed.

Excellent jeu, novateur par son concept : gameplay très centré sur le leadership et le moral des soldats qui lui sont liés. Du coup on aborde les missions avec un tout autre esprit que dans les wargames traditionnels : les capacités d'action des soldats sont totalement liées aux capacités de donneur d'ordre des officiers, du coup on construit une opération en l'articulant autour de ces officiers, leur positionnement, leurs déplacements, l'impact énorme sur le moral lorsque ces officiers sont tués ou blessés etc... Les graphismes sont assez basiques, en grille hex, mais personnellement pour ce type de jeu je n'attends pas plus, ce n'est pas important. Tout ce jeu, dans les graphismes, le gameplay, les mécaniques, me rappellent un très ancien wargame de plateau des années 80, Squad Leader : je retrouve beaucoup de petites touches de ce jeu dans Burden of Command. Je recommande fortement aux amateurs de wargame qui veulent tenter une nouvelle expérience, un peu en dehors des sentiers habituellement battus. Attention néanmoins, le système de sauvegardes est assez sévère et pourra en rebuter certains : uniquement 2 slots, celui du tour actuel et celui du précédent, c'est tout. Un choix strict des dev plutôt intéressant, même si ça m'a un peu énervé parfois, je ne regrette pas d'avoir suivi l'expérience.

Really engaging leadership RPG, do note that everything that happens in game cannot be undone. If one of your lieutenants is killed, that's it. You cannot reload saves. Which is a good thing in this game, as it puts real weight on your tactical choices.

Thoroughly enjoyable experience (finished the game), with the highlights making up for the flaws. The story is very much like Band of Brothers and the gameplay is somewhat like XCOM (use of cover and opportunity fire, but with more of an emphasis on lines of sight and armoured units). I agree with the majority of users who wrote that the Introduction is a major cause of people (about 2/3 according to Steam achievements) to drop the game. I attribute this to the developer breaking immersion to personally teach game mechanics in the introduction, when the mechanics become intuitive enough to not require that level of teaching (that takes away the fun). There are still bugs a year on, too, with occasional crashes (just once or twice), slight visual bugs, or minor events happening in-game despite choosing a different option in an earlier narrative part (e.g. a mountain getting saturated with smoke despite declining this advantage to the player, plus officers not actually leaving when put on leave for rest & recovery). Performance can be very slow too, with the enemy AI taking almost a minute or so to complete a turn, or behaving erratically (not pressing an advantage and under-utilizing their tanks). But despite all these flaws as an indie title, the story was truly excellent and among the top I've played in any game (in large service to the Choice Of Games writers Paul Wang of "Sabres of Infinity" and Allen Gies of the "Tin Star"). I cared a good deal about the characters and read satisfactory endings to their stories in the epilogue (though I felt that my own character's epilogue was rather generic given everything that happened). The writing took narrative risks and made tough choices of the fates of certain characters, and the story is better for that. The writing isn't flawless (I felt that various characters were under-written), but was very enjoyable and immersive. The core gameplay itself is also a highlight, despite the flaws. The main philosophy of "find, fix, flank, and finish" made for a fun gameplay loop. Yes, frontal assaults still work, but suppressing the opposing force and closing in was an enjoyable challenge. Dashing across an open field without enough suppression could be lethal, and led to interesting solutions in maps where that was required (e.g. through suppression by mortars and armour). In short: the core gameplay and story made the game well-worth playing for me, as a fan of "Choice of" choose-your-own adventure games, story-heavy games, and relatively-easy tactical games. It's worth trying if this is your type of game, just as long as you can get past the introduction (and persist through some longer, low-action missions at around Anzio). The difficult felt to be around the level of a modern XCOM game, and easier than Civilization and far, far easier than any Paradox game.

I *LOVED* this game! As a person who consumes more WW2 media than is probably healthy, I found this game to be wonderfully informative as well as narratively engaging. You learn a lot about the exploits of a very specific US division (namely the 7th Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Infantry Division) who saw a bit of every campaign against the Germans and Italians, many of which don't get as much spotlight in historical media as the more popular invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium. The game does a very good job of setting you up against what are sometimes very tough decisions throughout the narrative, without the benefit of save scumming (believe me, I tried haha). Sometimes things go very wrong, despite your best intentions and figuring out how to navigate the fallout of some of the things that happen ends up being some of the best game narrative I've encountered in a long time. You get a lot of opportunity to get close to many named characters for whom survival is not always going to be guaranteed. When you get someone you liked killed, and there is no going back, it has a cascading effect on the narrative drama, as well as effects on the outcome of some of your gameplay battles. The hex-based combat sections are solid, if a little repetitive. The meat of the game is in the dialogue story sections but a lot of time gets spent in these battles, which can sometimes be a bit frustrating with the limited number of tactical options available to you. The game hammers on the real life 4 F's of infantry squad tactics (Find, Fix, Flank, Finish), and for the most part succeeds at getting you to at least appreciate the methodology of a real life firefight. To bottom line this before I ramble on too long, I highly recommend this game if you're a serious military history nerd. The earnest attempt at making an authentic narrative combined with a plethora of era photos, documents, and countless numbers of quotes from various resource books was, to me, a great way to feel that little bit closer to history. If you're looking specifically for a turn-based tactics game, it's pretty good, but you might want to watch a few videos of how it plays first, just to make sure it's beefy enough for what you're looking for. Wrapping yourself in the narrative is clearly the objective for these developers.

Throwback to old hexagon boardgames with fun mechanics, story, decisions.