Battle Brothers is a cleverly constructed, carefully balanced board game. Each weapon has special abilities, and each tactic has a potential counter-tactic: maces are weak, but good against armor. Mar 24, 2017  Battle Brothers knows what it is and doesn't try to be more than it should be, and that makes it so much better than other titles that strive for an epic or storied feel. What's accomplished here is a solid, honest package of thrills and strategic depth, though not oppressively so.

SimMercenary, the sellsword leadership RPGReviewed on: Core i5-4690k, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 970 (See our for our current recommendations)Price: $30/£23Release date: Out nowPublisher: Overhype StudiosDeveloper: Overhype StudiosLink:Buy it:Read ourAround our campfire, the men eat and sleep and sharpen their axes. I’m worrying about our profit margin. Our contract pays 400 crowns for taking out these bandits, but the fat little nobleman who hired our mercenary company didn’t mention that we’d have to charter a boat and march for a week just to find them. Watching the miles tick by, I keep thinking the same thing: we’re barely going to break even.This is the kind of commander that Battle Brothers, a new medieval strategy RPG, has turned me into. In combat, I’m aggressive and decisive.

But when the fighting stops, I turn into a miser. Every coin and every bandage is money we need to stay alive, stay equipped, and keep going in this wonderful game of tactics and sellswords.The iron priceYou can march anywhere as long as you’ve got enough food to get there.As the new captain of a small band of sellswords, my options are pretty much unlimited. Villages and castles sit all around this quaint German countryside. From the map screen, clicking on any settlement will start the company, represented by an adorable little mercenary, marching forward in search of fortune. On the roads and near the towns, army patrols and trade caravans do business. In between are mountains, bandits, and things that growl in the dark.The wide-open map in Battle Brothers is beautifully freeing.

You can march anywhere as long as you’ve got enough food to get there. You can hire anyone as long as you’ve got the coin. It’s the same feeling that I get from playing Mount & Blade—or maybe from watching Firefly. Take a job, don’t matter what it is. Protect your crew.

Just keep marching. It’s tempting to think of Battle Brothers as a business sim obsessed with profits and losses, but it’s not. Profits are a means to an end: extra money builds the company so it can take more jobs. You’re not building a retirement plan, here, so breaking even is OK.Even without dreams of riches, money is a real crunch early in the game.

Desperate for money, I take the only contract at a nearby city and spend my last cash outfitting three new recruits. There were many good, solid, fighting men looking for work at that tavern. I couldn’t afford them, though, so I hired a drunk, a farmhand, and an elderly shepherd with a club foot. I gave them swords and a saluting lesson, and it was time to go to war.Choosing which weapons to buy and outfitting the company is a much deeper strategic exercise than it looks. Battle Brothers is a cleverly constructed, carefully balanced board game. Each weapon has special abilities, and each tactic has a potential counter-tactic: maces are weak, but good against armor; heavy axes are very powerful, but slow.

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Every choice—and there are a lot of choices to make—is an exercise in trade-offs, in choosing the least-bad option.I took my company and new recruits and marched them into the teeth of a bandit ambush. In combat, the map screen dissolves into a hex-based battlefield dotted with trees and stones. Characters from both sides take turns moving and making attacks. Soldiers look like bobbleheads, their oversized faces grimacing above pixel-art armor.

They march with triumphant hop-hop-hop motions, as if they’re counting spaces out loud in Monopoly.It’s cute until a spearman’s neck explodes from the force of an axe blow, his head rolling in a shower of arterial blood. I have never seen such brutal pixel-art violence. In Battle Brothers, I've seen punctured lungs and men slowly beaten to death with clubs, their eyes going black with blood. Combat in Battle Brothers is what you get when Game of Thrones has a one-night stand with X-COM: turn-based, hexagonal, and everything looks noble until someone sews a dog’s head onto a corpse.At the end of the battle, I’ve lost three men and injured many more.

We loot corpses for meager, broken gear, then head back to get paid by the magistrate. After healing and rearming, we’re exactly where we started: six men, no experience, no equipment. We take another job.Lost in the woodsIn fairness to me, I shouldn’t have to watch 40 minutes of YouTube voiceover before I’m ready to play.One of the frustrating things about Battle Brothers is the lack of tutorials. This is a complicated board game with a lot of rules. For example: around each character there’s a one-hex boundary called the Zone of Control. Once you enter that boundary, you can’t disengage from melee. When a goblin rushed one of my archers, I tried to make the archer fall back to keep shooting from a distance, but when I tried to move the archer, he took damage and wasted his turn.

I wasted a few turns before I figured out what was happening.No one explains these rules, so I had to learn by doing. In fairness to developers Overhype, there are tutorial videos posted online. In fairness to me, I shouldn’t have to watch 40 minutes of YouTube voiceover before I’m ready to play. Another example: at the start of every battle, I scrambled to re-order my men, to bring the archers to the rear and the armored core of spearmen to the center. It was several hours before I accidentally discovered that I could use the company management screen to design a formation.The company management screen, and the surrounding menus, are my biggest complaint about Battle Brothers.

Managing inventory can get pretty clunky, especially when it comes to shopping for new recruits or gear. I frequently found a market with a nice-looking weapon, but in order compare it with my current loadout I had to close a screen, open a screen, navigate to a sub-menu, and click through individual soldiers to see who was carrying what. I keep a little notepad by the keyboard so I can compare axes and swords, longbows and crossbows. My company has room for 20 soldiers, and each one has his own loadout screen and skills that level up. The menus don’t destroy my fun entirely, but they’re definitely a grumble.Despite being fresh out of Early Access, though, the majority of Battle Brothers is well-oiled and dependably fun. I kept humming with the victory and despair I usually reserve for X-COM campaigns: the archer who makes a wondrous 19% headshot; the swordsman who blocks and dodges his way out of certain death; the veteran soldier suddenly gutted, lost forever behind the veil of permadeath.

Battle Brothers takes a formula I love and twists it to fit a wide-open medieval setting. I don’t have to save the world, I just have to make enough to fix my gear, hire a new sword, and go on to my next contract. The stakes aren't as high, but it feels just as rewarding.

The latest DLC for Battle Brothers, Beasts and Exploration, adds even more tests for your mercenary band.came out in 2017 and immediately grabbed me as a fantastic little game. It’s a classic roguelike experience (although you can save and reload!) presented in a tactical strategy manner. It takes place within a low-fantasy world populated by noble houses at each other’s throats, vicious bandits prowling for an easy mark, mercenary warbands, peasants trying to get by, and monsters drawn straight from European mythology.

One of the beautiful randomly generated maps of Battle Brothers.From the get go you are thrust into the role of a mercenary leader, with a beautifully thematic tutorial as a fading band of mercenaries fights to survive a skirmish with a bandit mob. Comparisons with Game of Thrones are easy to make, especially with events and dialogue written so you’d believe it had come from the latest episode, and if you enjoy the tactical combat of something like XCOM, the management aspects of Battletech, and fantasy worlds that draw a distinct parallel with real European history, then you’ll almost certainly enjoy the core game. The tactical combat layer.It’s been served since 2017 with the Lindwurm DLC, which added dragons as a rare endgame monster, but it has now received its first real expansion pack in Beasts and Exploration. The DLC massively expands the game world, adding legendary locations to find in the wilderness, new monsters, a crafting system and customisation for equipment.

All of this comes alongside more equipment to collect, as well as more contracts to pick up, events which can be positive or negative, and ambitions (little mini-goals you pick from as the game goes on which give a stronger sense of direction to gameplay).I’ll cover the new monsters first, as these provided me with both some interesting new challenges and some real new frustrations. The five new monster types added to the game are the Unholds (big yeti-like giants), Waldschrats (the trees are talking, Merry!), Webknechts (giant spiders), Hexes (witches), and saving the worst for last, the Alps (some kind of horrific sleep monster). Unholds!The spiders, yetis, and tree people are all pretty fun to fight — the tree people and giants require you to work to flank and whittle down their high health and use the battlefield. They’ll hit hard, but you’re fighting a giant creature. The tree people are also able to grow shields on their arms, and this feels like a cool thematic piece to make the fights more interesting. The largest groups of these I encountered were only three monsters strong, so the balance felt about right against my full complement of brothers.

The spiders are much like the existing direwolves, except they have eggs to spawn new enemies throughout the fight and can poison you — a fun and challenging fight in wooded terrain against an unarmoured but quick enemy follows. Maybe you too will learn to fear the chittering in the dark woods at nightThe witches and alps are, for me at least, the absolute worst, and a number of reviews on Steam highlight others’ frustrations with these mobs.

Alps (at least during my play when the DLC came out) caused me to rage quit due to their ability to put brothers to sleep and attack them at will using summoned shades. They’re also fast, and the best strategy (garbage for roleplaying!) is to strip your party naked and sprint at them with spears and knives. When you’ve spent so much of the game building up a strong party of armoured knights, these fights felt like a slap in the face and did spoil the fun. The problems with alps do seem to have been patched out since my first playthrough however — they now summon small groups of ‘nightmares’ around your party, which can be killed in one hit rather than the old sleep mechanic. There are also mods available to debuff them further, so these guys shouldn’t be seen as a reason not to get the DLC.Hexes are annoying with their ability to mind control your party, but have low armour and will turn to mush if you hit them, but long range spell casting against which there’s no real defence isn’t too fun either. Thankfully, they don’t seem to be too common and I met them briefly. Like with a lot of things in Battle Brothers, it’s your choice as to whether you want to engage them or not and take contracts relating to them.The new monsters, and the existing ones, do add to the new crafting system, and battling them will drop components in the party loot screen.

These can be used to make new items, potions, and poisons, as well as being made into paint for customising your gear. All you have to do is collect the bits you need and find a town with a taxidermist. On the randomly generated maps the game uses this can be a bit tricky but is well worth it, with items giving you bonuses in battle and on the world map, depending on whether they’re applied to your gear, or to your battle brothers themselves.

Creating a fur mantle out of direwolf skins which adds durability to your gear and frightens any enemies you’re in melee with is just one of the many options, and it’s well worth experimenting to see what works best. A shield, made from the flesh of a ‘schrat.New items for sale have also been added, and these include some great little nods to real arms and armour of the medieval period.

Adding metal plates (drawn like besagews — little metal circles to cover the armpit joint) to plate armour to increase its durability is a lovely little touch, and I enjoyed seeing my men develop from men in padded jacks to fully plated knights. There’s also new armour and weapons, and all of these have been beautifully imagined in the fantastic art style the game has. It looks traditionally drawn and the character in the little men you command, and the equipment they wear helps to bring the grim world of Battle Brothers to life.The legendary locations were great fun, adding depth to the world, and a nice reward for going exploring. Whilst moving my party between towns looking for work, I decided to send them off the road. To our great surprise, we found a ship in a tree, and clicking through a series of well-written events ended up with us finding the golden goose. I wasn’t able to find any more during my playthrough but a quick glance at the wiki shows that there’s eleven to find in total.

I’m sure each will give a neat little event chain, and from reading (I don’t want to spoil them for you!) some seem like they’ll create pretty cool scenarios for battles, including the kraken (okay, one spoiler!)It was hard to pick out which contracts were new, but it certainly felt like there was more variation than on release (you’d pretty much spend your life killing bandits, delivering letters, and guarding caravans until an endgame event) and I didn’t get bored of finding dangerous well-paid work for my band of ne’er do wells. One contract we were given, to hunt down ‘schrats, and the flavourful text.The events too helped to bring more flavour to the world, and the ambitions felt more varied and gave me great goals to work towards. These are essential in a game as open ended as this one, and they do give you somewhere to go next rather than just living in permanent pursuit of better weapons and armour to hit things with better. A welcome surprise, when I let one of my brothers charge an Unhold alone One of the new ambitions resolved successfully.Whilst the DLC did have its frustrations, Beasts and Exploration is well worth the money. It fleshes out the world, gives you more things to do, more things to fight, and adds much needed depth to running your ragtag band of mercenaries. I had a lot of fun starting my review playthrough and using the new options to improve gear and the more varied contracts, and it really adds a new lease of life to the game.

If you like mercenary management games with a deep tactical combat layer, especially one which nods so clearly to medieval history and mythology, Battle Brothers should go on your list. In fact, after writing this, I’m going to dive right back in and see what trouble I can find (and get paid for)Battle Brothers, and it’s Beast and Exploration DLC, are available now for Windows PC..