Tense and mechanically well made battles with one of the best systems for units orders and turns I've seen combined with a very well written narrative that covers both issues faced by soldiers in war as well as historical issues by civilians and at home. Not the most visually impressive but very good voice work for your officers and nice little text details describing events and soldier dialogue while the battles play out. A near decade long wait for it to release and it did not disappoint. But it can give people a bad first impression with an awful tutorial combined with just not explaining certain things when new elements are introduced.

Burden of Command combines narrative visual novel style moments between and during battles where you make choices that can influence battle conditions, the abilities of yourself and of your Lieutenants, the danger certain characters are put in, and where you can influence the trust of your men and prestige gained through your career that can both be used to maintain, train, and replenish, your company. The narrative sections are full of photos, documents, historical notes, and videos made during WWII or of interviews with WWII veterans years later to give the context of the events, sometimes real world characters, and scenarios.

On the battlefield the game is a turn based hex strategy game where your character is able to spend your orders to command any unit you want and one of your chosen Lieutenant can spend their orders to perform actions themselves or command one of their three squads. Your force consists of you as the Captain who can take command of or lead any squad while also spotting for on and off map artillery and four Lieutenants with three of the Lieutenants each in charge of three infantry units with your final Lieutenant leading the heavy weapons teams consisting of a mortar team, two MG teams, and having the ability to call in and spot for on map artillery he is in charge of. Depending on the mission and how events go in story scenes you may be joined with additional combat squads, squads you need to rescue, machine gunners, flamethrowers, bazooka teams, and tanks that come with their own commander. When you have given all the commands you want with the current Lieutenant or run out of orders for them you hit the turn button which then allows for the possibility of enemy units to interact before you can select another Lieutenant to take command of. If you have remaining orders left with one Lieutenant you can give them another turn later. These rounds last until you finally use up everyone's orders or until you hit the end turn button twice in a row with you having done nothing between them and the enemy having done nothing, once that happens everyone has their orders reset and the next turn begins.

One of my favorite aspects of the game narratively is just having the portrayal of battlefield conditions like civilian interactions and casualties, trauma, how you deal with looting, mundane moments between the action, meeting or hearing about historical figures, watching a naturalization ceremony for some of your men, characters mentioning real historic events going on in other parts of Europe or back in America and sometimes their perspective on those events, etc. You spend some time exploring Rome after its liberation where you engage with different problems from your men, leaders, and civilians, can be pulled into side narrative missions where how you react or plans you agree to can lead to a variety of different conclusions, you enter liberated towns where the history of the locations can lead to citizens having mixed loyalties due to a mixed French and German culture.

The game might not look that impressive but I do like the little details on display during battles and what voice acting there is. Each of your officers and the First Sergeant with you have voice actors with multiple lines for different commands that do a good job giving more personality to them or naming the men that serve in their platoon. As you move your units around or give them orders they will have different text under your unit with what your men are saying or how they answer the spoken lines from the officers. Descriptive text under units might appear to better describe certain battle conditions or as reactions to different events. Text might detail that your soldiers are looting something, mentioning something about the terrain or building entered, a unit might suddenly lose morale with text mentioning that they found bodies of civilians, or it might show even more direct gameplay mechanics with them stating that they have found and marked mines.

Much of the story details and the additional historic information displayed between battles or during events is likely to interest those who enjoy real history. Some of the small moments and historical happenings mentioned here might lead to someone exploring more of those topics on their own and when it comes to the narrative of a game like this I've always thought that was the most important part of telling a story based on actual events. I really liked that they picked a group to follow that fought the French, Italians, and Germans because that creates a fairly logical difficulty curve as you fight more experienced and better equipped opponents while also getting to see more of the war. More than halfway through the campaign you hear about the Normandy landings while you are in the middle of near trench warfare with your men asking you if you think it will effect anything where you are, and I realized that due to the average video game and WWII film it seems likely to me that the average American (if they knew what the Normandy landings were) would also probably think that was how the US entered the war.

For your main officers. Wilson is a career solider since WWI who has a by the book attitude to tactics but has moments where his age catches up to him, where he becomes disillusioned by seeing the same kind of mistakes and tragedies repeated. Stern is Jewish and has a better idea of what the Nazis are really doing while other officers dismiss him saying that the things he mention have to be rumors because Germans are a cultured people. He is the most happy to be killing Nazis and is more distrustful of German Americans at home and in the army, when you tell him that you are all Americans there to fight on the same side he brings up the American groups like the Bund back home. Dearborn became my favorite character while starting out with me thinking he was going to be an idiot. A wordy southern gentleman who heavily studies history, languages, past battles and leaders, and walks calmly through enemy fire as if he were the modern fool who thinks if they were born 100s of years ago they would be a great commander conquering the world. Except Dearborn ends up being both extremely competent and actually very well educated so he does have a significant advantage over the average Joe Rogan fan. He also seems most likely to be a racist given his upbringing from a Confederacy supporting family and later comments about a new officer not trusted by the men yet having never commanded whites before. As the battles go on though he seems to be the most emotionally effected of the officers finding him frequently mourning the loss of the men who died following his orders even if he achieved victory, he tells you of his family's pride in fighting for the south during the Civil War and why they can't understand that can't understand that he doesn't take pride in it. He brings up the shifting views of the Civil War being fought over states rights/lost cause myth myth instead of slavery mentioning the propaganda that was starting to be be spread around the time that greatly gained in popularity in the uneducated public consensus as the decades went on.

Full Review: https://backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/3855505/
Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/kennanw.bsky.social/post/3mb4cldvrts26

Excellent combat hurt by your overpowered character until endgame content, a lack of options for certain weapons, a repetitive open world, poor story, and terrible mission design.

Rise of the Ronin's story takes place from 1853 to 1868 during the opening of Japan and arrival of the American, British, and French ships, battles between the Choshu, Satsuma, and Shinsengumi, the Boshin War, fall of the Tokugawa shogunate, and modernized to the Meiji government. It tells this story in one of the worst ways possible. You are from a village that trains Blade Twins, two Ronin/Assassins that work together their entire lives to fulfill the village's goal of overthrowing the Shogunate because they upset them for some reason. When the American ships arrive your two created characters are given a mission to assassinate Commodore Matthew Perry and steal a message he is in possession of. Another Samurai stops the assassination and apparently kills your Blade Twin, not long after your village is attacked by Shogunate and almost everyone is killed. Believing that your twin is alive you inform your master that you intend to leave and duel them to the death to start your search. Your character has no interesting in your former village's goals or avenging anyone there, and even if that might have been interesting by the time you meet the shogun the one that destroyed your villager was the previous shogun anyway. Your blade twin is quickly found and becomes both your goal and an antagonist for the entire game, them completely lacking any personality and you spending no time with them does not make this a good plot hook. As you go through the game you work with and befriend characters (mostly based on real people) from various factions, there are many characters but very few get much time in the spotlight for any kind of development. At times you choose which faction to support, though that never sticks and tends to only be for one mission or a short series of missions, who you side with has no effect on the main plot, event outcomes, or who lives and dies (though you can save Ryoma Sakamoto, Soji Okita, and Shinsaku Takasugi by doing bond missions with them but their survival also doesn't really change the plot). This makes the story even stranger as you are just friends with everyone but also seemingly constantly betraying everyone and fighting them all. At one point you might choose to join the Shinsengumi for a little while, only to then just forget that you did that, have to go back posing as a new recruit with a mask on as a disguise for another mission where you try to find out who attempted to assassinate Ryoma, and your and Ryoma's entire idea of who you are supporting seemingly shifts for no actual reason other than you finished a short chain of missions. There's a lot of bad and strange romance options with members of the Choshu and characters like Soji Okita, Matthew Perry, Genzui Kusaka's wife, and Yoshida Shōin's sister. It's also a very odd part of history to make a working with your friends for the peaceful future and betterment of the country storyline when historically basically everyone dies around the time of the game, gets assassinated shortly after, dies of cancer and/or tuberculosis shortly after, rebels against the new government and dies shortly after, and some of your allies actions basically leads to the annexation of Korea and the Empire of Japan, which all kind of makes the happy credit slideshow a bit of a downer.

The combat side of gameplay is very good, because it's worse Nioh with a good parry system, and even a worse Nioh is still about as good as it gets. You and your enemies have health and stamina. You do damage to their health and stamina when you hit them but primarily do stamina damage when landing attacks when they guard or by parrying their combos or heavy attacks with successful parries also briefly (sometimes very briefly) stunning your enemy and lowering their maximum stamina until you drain the meter. Draining their stamina puts them in a longer stun state where you can land some free hits and do a grapple attack for a large amount of damage. As you attack your weapon will also build up blood and as that builds up you can press a button to flick the blood off to recover some of your own stamina during a combo. Successfully parrying enemy attacks lowers their maximum stamina making it easier to get them into a state where you can grapple them for a high damage attack. Dodging, rolling, or just guarding are also viable ways to avoid damage, and enemies missing attacks will also cause them to drain their own stamina.

You can equip two primary and two secondary ranged weapons. Your primary weapons consist of katana, duel katana, polearm, spear, odachi, great sword, oxtail blade, saber, and fists. For each weapon you will eventually learn different fighting styles and you can equip three fighting styles to swap between for each weapon type (unfortunately some weapons only have three or four styles until you finish the game and unlock one more and some might not even complete their third style until near the end of the game, and the fist style only has one style). Each style starts with two special martial arts attacks (which if it is a weapon that was in Nioh is probably one of the special moves from that weapon on those games), unlocks a third master attack when the style is improved, and finally unlocks a forth slot that allows you to slot any other master skill from the same weapon type in (would have been nice if it was just any move from the same type for more customization). A style will also have one of three types that are good or bad to use against certain kinds of enemy weapons where using a strong style will do more stamina damage to an enemy when you parry their attacks. The first style is not strong or weak to anything and a few weapons can get a style of the shinobi type that has no strengths or weaknesses but does more stamina damage the closer you get to parrying right before the blow would land. Though not very customizable apart from that one extra master skill or using a weapon like the Katana that just has about 10 different styles to choose from, the martial arts moves, the different main and strong attacks attached to each style, in addition to chain attacks that activate when you swap to a different style or weapon after an attack allows for a wide variety of attack options. With some moves having defensive elements like jumping you in the air or backwards, quickly moving to the side or behind an enemy, or putting them in a different kind of grapple if your break their stamina during the attack.

You also get an instant win button, unless you are on the postgame difficulty, where you can charge up a mode that when activated sets your weapon on fire and allows endless martial arts moves until the mode ends. This brings up the biggest problem with the combat, being that it is so easy before you get to post game "midnight" difficulty content and you have access to so many quick healing items early on (10 refilling flask style ones, in addition to craftable healing options and buffing options I never used) that you really don't have to engage with any of the mechanics seriously other than doing so to create your own fun.

Secondary weapons allows you to equip rifles, bows, handguns, firepots, flashbangs, shuriken, or a flamethrower. Depending on the weapon you might be able to either use a consumable to do something like shoot a flaming arrow or swap out different types of ammunition or fuel. Some take time to draw and aim while the shuriken can be rapidly thrown at one or multiple enemies to keep up pressure on them and stop them from recharging their stamina while the handgun can be rapidly fired or fired in between dodges but needs to be reloaded. You also have a grappling hook that can be...

Full Review: https://backloggd.com/u/Kennan/review/3177119/