If there is one mechanic that makes Wanderburg stand out from the usual roguelike crowd, it is the way your castle physically grows as you play. You are not simply unlocking bigger numbers on a character sheet or buying another passive upgrade from a menu. Your fortress gets larger, heavier, more dangerous, and harder to…
If you’ve spent enough time with indie games, you eventually learn to recognize the ideas that sound completely ridiculous on paper but somehow become incredibly addictive once you get your hands on them. Wanderburg is absolutely one of those games. Randwerk, the studio behind Abriss, is taking the familiar ingredients of roguelites, tactical combat, destruction,…
There are games you start because the trailer looks cool, and then there are games that quietly eat an entire evening because you keep telling yourself, “Okay, one more mission.” Star Wars Zero Company is absolutely the second kind for me. As someone who loves quality strategy games but has become increasingly picky about them,…
I’ve played strategy games for years, from the original XCOM to Gears Tactics, Phoenix Point, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, and just about every tactical RPG that promised meaningful squad management. Most of them got the combat right. Very few made me care about the people standing behind the guns. After spending time with everything Bit Reactor…
There is a certain type of strategy game that can completely ruin your plans for the evening. You start with a few tents, place a couple of buildings, tell yourself you will play for 30 minutes, and suddenly it is 2:00 AM. That was basically my experience with Mandate Order. Digital Sky’s historical strategy game…
Mandate Order is one of those strategy games that immediately makes me stop scrolling. Not because it has the biggest budget, not because a famous publisher is behind it, and definitely not because the genre needs another generic city-builder. It caught my attention because it is trying to mash together several things that rarely work…
There are few things more frustrating than finally sitting down to play a new strategy game, only to spend the next ten minutes staring at the same loading screen. That is exactly the problem some Mandate Order players are running into. The ancient Chinese city-builder and war strategy game has plenty of systems running behind…
There are some strategy games where the first few hours feel like a tutorial you are simply waiting to escape. Mandate Order isn’t really like that. From the moment I started building my first settlement, I had the feeling that almost every decision was going to come back and matter later. Digital Sky’s ancient Chinese…
If you have spent any real amount of time with strategy games, you probably know the feeling. You discover a promising city builder, spend the first few hours laying roads and assigning workers, and then immediately think: “This would be so much better with a friend.” That was one of my first thoughts when I…
If you have been following the strategy scene lately, Mandate Order is probably one of those games that keeps showing up on your radar. It has the kind of premise that immediately grabs anyone who has spent hundreds of hours in city builders, grand strategy games, or anything involving an absurd number of soldiers marching…
