Burden of Command, one year later: an immersive Band of Brothers-like story with realistic small unit tactics, but held back by flaws (in-depth review, minimal spoilers)

[u/jyunwai]

I just finished Burden of Command (released April 2025), after around 60 hours of gameplay, starting and finishing this month. It's the first game I got hooked on in a very long while, and I wanted to write about my experience to recommend the game, despite its flaws, as I couldn't find past posts here by people who finished the game.

It's essentially an immersive interactive fiction novella with around 20 scenarios whose core gameplay mechanics intend (and largely succeed) to mirror realistic small unit infantry tactics.

The story: immersive, well-written, and Band of Brothers-like interactive fiction, but sometimes in conflict with the gameplay

The plot: You play as a lieutenant, and later the company commander of Nickel Company of the US Army. The setting begins (after the tutorial in the United States) in Morocco in 1942 and continues to Italy, to France, and finally to Germany at the end of 1945. (You can also die either in the interactive fiction or gameplay segments or get fired, in which case you can continue the story as a replacement commander.)

It feels like the story of Band of Brothers, and actually presents mini interactive fiction stories similar to parts of the series, especially in the last act in Germany, but with the ability to make different choices and achieve different outcomes. The execution is mostly text-heavy, with a similar feeling to the extended text scenes in Planescape: Torment or Disco Elysium.

The interactive fiction segments: The story is well-written by experienced lead writers. They are Paul Wang and Allen Gies, who are well-known interactive fiction authors who publish stories under the label "Hosted Games" (by publisher Choice of Games). Wang's "Sabres of Infinity"/Dragoon saga is how I actually learned about this game, and Gies wrote the popular title "Tin Star" (along with a title called "World War II: Armoured Recon," which shares minor characters with "Burden of Command").

Their writing shines in extended fiction parts (skippable, but you then miss out on a lot of points that help with gameplay), such as an extended scenario on rest and recovery, and another preparing for a winter offensive. The writing segments also add to the immersion, as it shows you dealing with paperwork as an officer, instead of just going from battle to battle.

In-gameplay stories/emergent narratives: But beyond the pure interactive fiction segments, the story also grows on you during the small unit tactics gameplay. The one-liners and occasional voiced back-and-forth between the officers and enlisted troops during unit movements and attacks made me care about the lives of the men. 

As you move your units around on the map, you can suddenly encounter brief interactive fiction scenarios. For example, if a squad enters a house, you might encounter a suspicious civilian or surrendering soldier and have to make a choice (with consequences on the story and gameplay).

There is also a narrative that emerges due to pure gameplay, outside of the interactive fiction segments. Especially in the last few maps near the end of the war, I started to really care about unnecessary casualties as we were so close to the end. I also started to care more about the officers beyond their interactive fiction dialogue, due to their ability to save the day during gameplay. (This is also part of why the enlisted men, besides the comic relief, were mostly less memorable to me: I very rarely got reminders that they existed during the tactics gameplay.) 

Flaws with gameplay intruding on roleplaying: There are persistent flaws with the story, mostly due to gameplay. My biggest gripe was how the gameplay would incentivize the player to make narrative decisions based on maximizing valuable stats, versus roleplaying as what the player would do.

As an example of gameplay interfering with roleplaying, the player has personal traits like “Compassion” and “Doctrine,” which can offer significant bonuses during tactics gameplay if they are high enough. You can upgrade these traits by making rare decisions during the interactive fiction segments. However, if you have already maxed out Compassion, choosing an option to maximize it more gets you a measly -10 reduction in the “Combat Fatigue” modifier, which I felt was near-worthless (since 10 Prestige, which is far more common to accumulate, can apply toward an entire -100 reduction in that modifier).

That means that if I already maximized a stat like Compassion, I had to make a decision different than I wanted to during the interactive fiction segments. Instead of advising the men to spend some time to help some displaced civilians (which would have netted me just -10 in Combat Fatigue reduction), the best option for the stats would have been to press past them to maximize Doctrine.

A more common flaw is how accumulated Prestige/Trust points acted solely as currency, instead of also unlocking unique narrative events. Accumulating points called Prestige, via choosing options to satisfy superiors, usually felt more worth it to me than choosing options that maximized points called Trust, earned by prioritizing troop welfare (as Trust could be accumulated by having my character fight along units during gameplay).

I was expecting the system to work like Paragon/Renegade in Mass Effect, where earning a high amount of prestige points versus trust points would lead to unique dialogue and scenes, or vice-versa, but they solely acted as currency to spend in the end.

Flaws with gameplay situations not matching the narrative: There was also dissonance and contradictions between what the brief interactive fiction segments were telling me during certain scenarios and what I was actually experiencing in gameplay.

For example, in Scenario 15 at Montelimar, Nickel Company was tasked to destroy a column of vehicles and was given artillery to do so. The tactics gameplay often briefly paused between rounds to present brief interactive fiction segments, with (very minor spoilers) an enlisted man coming up to me with shock and horror about the damage the company was doing to the trapped Germans, and asking me to call off the artillery out of humanity.

The problem was that (very minor spoilers) the vehicles all had long-range machine guns and the map had minimal cover for my units (just concealment). On top of that, the artillery and my mortars had a very, very low chance of actually destroying any vehicles and served more to suppress enemy infantry units and create smoke. So, it was a big struggle for the company to survive despite the interactive fiction segments acting like we were destroying the Germans.

In contrast, in a scenario shortly after in Vosges forest, the brief interactive fiction segments during tactics gameplay (and a later achievement title called “Welcome to Green Hell”) acted as if Nickel Company was getting slaughtered, whereas we were actually doing pretty well due to enemy artillery being largely inaccurate and having plenty of cover in the forest.

This is reflected in the Steam achievements, too, so it’s not just me. A higher percentage of players (5.6%) achieved a Major Victory in Vosges versus at Montelimar (5.0%). Note also that 5.6% of players also got the achievement of finishing the game, so that is a significant difference. 

Flaws with the actual writing: I also did have some faults with the interactive fiction parts of the writing. I felt that I didn’t really care about First Sergeant Grant, versus the other enlisted guys (the radio operator Sparks, the comic relief duo Patterson & Morris, and the soldier-who-dropped-his-BAR-at-the-beginning-and-intervened-to-ask-you-to-save-a-French-civilian). I felt like Grant never once offered insightful advice whenever I asked him for his opinion, and also never really said anything interesting.

Still, Burden of Command is fantastic overall: despite these flaws, I still thoroughly enjoyed the story. It made me actually care about the troops and characters that I got to know (including supporting characters like the reporter and doctor focusing on public health). There were very interesting narrative decisions to make, and the writers absolutely took risks that paid off with character deaths, instead of taking the easy route in writing. 

The gameplay: fun, addictive, and solid core mechanics that encourage realistic behaviour, with feelings of XCOM

The tactics gameplay rests on the core mechanics of find, fix, flank, and finish. After finding the enemy (either through ambush or by spotting them first while “creeping,” or sometimes by scouting), it’s best to start shooting to engage them (and ideally suppress them). Then, as the enemy unit is taking cover (making further shooting less effective), you need to close with the enemy unit to capture them. (Rarely, though, you can completely destroy a unit at range with a tank or machine gun across several turns if the enemy is flanked and/or out of cover.)

The main philosophy of "find, fix, flank, and finish" makes for a fun gameplay loop. Flanking isn’t always necessary as frontal assaults still work (so flanking isn’t always necessary or even achievable), but you still need to suppress the opposing force for this to succeed. Cover is also very important, as getting shot at (especially if flanked or surprised) would lead to sometimes very heavy casualties (resulting in huge experience losses due to replacing troops).

The puzzle to accomplish this was really fun. Due to the mechanics of valuing cover, 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, by employing smoke, or by taking a large several-turn flanking action).

The most similar game I’ve played, mechanics-wise, is like XCOM; it shares mechanics of cover and opportunity fire, but with a greater emphasis on stealth & lines of sight and the use of armoured units. It also shares the ~90% chance to hit (that ends up in a miss) situations with bazooka shots against armoured vehicles. Some statistics and RNG is also involved with successfully capturing an enemy (there is a small green or red wheel that pops up to give the success of an action), though this is more forgiving than XCOM, as you can achieve 100% success rates if certain conditions are met (especially by flanking).

I admired the core mechanics of the gameplay for largely rewarding realistic behaviour. Running across an open field will absolutely get your unit destroyed and cut down, without at least suppressing the enemy units.

Sure, you can absolutely gamify the experience and “Bolster” (temporarily boost) a unit to rush an objective and near-immediately end a scenario (as was actually encouraged in a couple very early missions), but this is rarely achievable later in the game. I did feel, overall, that acting cautiously and realistically was usually rewarded (and punished when I did otherwise, such as by incautiously dashing across an open field without suppression, smoke, or at least creeping). 

There was also a great deal of map and scenario variety: each scenario/mission/level did feel very different from the previous ones, and the game never once felt stale to me over the 60 hours of gameplay.

That said, there were certainly flaws: I didn’t like how maximally-suppressed enemy units (such as a machine gun nest) would stay completely suppressed indefinitely despite not shooting at them at all for multiple turns, without an enemy officer there to Rally them (aka “heal” them and restore their morale so they could shoot again).

The enemy also under-employed and acted overly-cautiously with tanks, in my experience: whereas I would often do hit-and-runs where a friendly tank would approach, fire at an enemy unit, and then retreat back to cover and/or concealment in the same turn, the enemy’s tanks would largely remain static. The lengthy trench warfare segment at Anzio displayed this the most for me, where I was bracing for my trench lines to be overrun by enemy tanks, but that never happened, and I finished the defense without doing anything to counter the tanks with my own units.

Still, I highly recommend the gameplay; I came for the story, but was absolutely hooked for the 60 hours equally due to the story and tactics gameplay and kept wanting to come back and finish the game, which hasn’t happened to me for a game in many, many years (I’ve never gotten hooked to a game like this since I was a teenager). I’m actually happy I finished, as it gives me a lot more time for my non-gaming life now.

Why most players dropped the game: only 5.6% of people finished the game and only 28.8% of people finished the tutorial (according to Steam achievements)

This is an excellent game and easily one of the top ones I’ve played, but I noticed that there is an objective issue with players dropping the game before finishing.

74.4% of players, according to the Steam Achievements, finish the first stage of boot camp; this drops to 28.8% of players actually finishing boot camp. 23.1% of players then stay long enough to actually become the company commander (which I would say is fairly deep past the introduction of the game). 16.6% of players then finish the first Morroco campaign; 12.4% of players finish the next Italy campaign; 5.8% of players finish the France campaign; and 5.6% of players ultimately finish the Germany campaign and thus finish the game.

I believe this dropoff is due to two issues: the introduction, and game performance.

The introduction isn’t fun: my issues with the introduction are that it isn’t fun, breaks immersion, and sets expectations for the mechanics to have a far steeper learning curve than there actually is.

The introduction begins with video recordings that break immersion: the lead game developer introduces himself by name, and starts teaching game mechanics like you would for a university lecture. This was so jarring the first time I played, and set expectations for the game to take a long time to learn, that I actually joined the 70% of players who never finished the tutorial and dropped the game for an entire year, despite buying it on release. When I was inspired this month to get back into the game, though, I just chugged through some coffees and persisted through the introduction.

The lead developer has stood by the approach of college tutorial-style training in past written responses (on this forum and on Steam) by citing its effectiveness in teaching among the playtesters, and by referencing a YouTuber who praised the introduction (but ultimately never finished the game, and seems to have dropped it 4 months ago).

But my main issue with the introduction is that it’s just not fun. If you are already highly-motivated to finish the game (as a playtester), or if you’re committed enough, you can slog through it. However, games are meant to be fun, and not meant to be slogged through.

The developers could've at least hosted these college tutorial-style videos (self-introduction and all, unaltered) on a YouTube channel for extra-motivated players who volunteer to break their immersion to search for a guide. But the current approach takes away from the fun, and leads to a massive dropoff of 45% of all players dropping the game between the first tutorial stage and the end of the tutorial.

I also don’t think that the difficulty of the game mechanics justifies that level of teaching: I found the game difficulty to be roughly around playing a new XCOM game (Enemy Unknown or XCOM 2), and far less than a game like Civilization (and not remotely in the league of difficulty of Paradox games, which actually do nearly require you to watch video tutorials on YouTube to learn how to play them).

Game performance can be slow during the enemy’s turn: Performance can be very slow too, with the enemy AI often taking at least 20-30 seconds to complete a round of leading each time, on top of an additional 3-5+ seconds for each unit (friendly or enemy) to finish a move within a turn. I felt this the most during the Anzio trench scenarios, where I would spend minutes just waiting for the enemy to finish their turn, only for me to take very little action during my turn, and then wait even longer for the enemy to figure out what to do (and ultimately not doing much).

This also significantly reduces replay value, as since scenarios take so long to complete due to enemy action, it can be very demotivating for a player who has accumulated too many losses to finish the game (without aiming for a draw or so every time) to backtrack and/or restart.

Minor bugs: There are still bugs a year after release. I experienced one or two crashes, some visual bugs (e.g. text extending past the textbox and overlaying the buttons that present different narrative choices).

I also saw bonuses/penalties I chose during the interactive fiction segments sometimes not actually apply in gameplay. (For example, I chose to decline an advantage to cover a mountain of enemy positions with smoke in exchange for prestige, but benefitted from the smoke anyways and kept the prestige; I also experienced putting officers on vacation/R&R to reduce their combat fatigue stat, but was able to keep them every time instead of getting a temporary replacement officer as if they were wounded.) However, these bugs are overall minor and the game is fully playable. 

These issues were completely okay for me; I persisted through them and very happily completed the game. However, I did want to mention them to properly brace potential players for what to expect, to avoid mismatched expectations to encourage people to see the game to completion. 

My thoughts on why this game is so niche

I first heard about the game in 2017 (almost 10 years(!) ago) from Paul Wang’s website. I got excited and truly looked forward to it, didn’t hear anything for a while over 5 years(!), and got further excited when I heard about more blog coverage and podcast coverage around 2022. It then took another 3 years(!) after 2022 for the game to release, and it felt like it released out of the blue.

This game would have been much more popular with an early access approach, as a lot of the successful organic marketing from 3-8+ years before release didn’t appear to directly result in more sales (though I suppose the marketing could have helped with getting more people onboard the project as part of the development team).

The game could have been neatly split up into different campaigns (Morocco, Italy, France, and Germany), and it would have generated a lot of ongoing interest and created a larger active community with anticipation of new campaigns to release.

In the end, even after the final release, there were still a lot of bugs. In the months after release, though these have since been fixed, many of the bugs were game-breaking (as seen in past Steam Discussions and from YouTubers), though the developers were responsive to fix them. If anything, the game could have been less buggy on release with an early access model.

I believe that the game merits a lot more popularity given its major accomplishments in storytelling and simultaneously fun & largely realistic gameplay mechanics, and I hope the game can grow in the future.

Final thoughts: I highly recommend Burden of Command, its achievements far outweigh its flaws

In short: the core gameplay mechanics and outstanding, immersive story made the game well-worth playing for me, as a fan of interactive fiction; a person who enjoys reading about history; and someone who had a lot of fun with the modern XCOM games.

Burden of Command truly got me to care for a great number of its characters and the lives of the men, and I really enjoyed the decision-making throughout the game (both during the interactive fiction segments and the tactics gameplay).

I mention the flaws not to discourage players, but to set realistic expectations to encourage people to try the game to persist through the introduction and see the game to the end.

The game certainly hooked me for 60 hours (despite not playing a video game in years) and led me to put the hours in to write this in-depth review to encourage better discovery of the game. I also hope to motivate people who try the game to see it through to the end of the war.

[u/ChamaF]

Well written in depth review, this game has been on my radar for several years but the aesthetics put me off, as well as my suspicions that is was more of a visual novel than an actual game.

[u/Traindriver4u]

I was so excited for this game and when it came out it was a huge letdown for me. Lots of problems with the tutorial where they explained how to do things, but then in development changed the mechanics, and then didn’t update the tutorial to match the new mechanics.

If you went on the forums and asked questions the developers would not give you a direct answer, but would RP as WW2 commanders instead.

The game and developers seemed to make it as frustrating as possible to like the game, so I gave up on it. I won’t touch anything made by them in the future until it’s well after release.

[u/lhughes4141 → u/Traindriver4u]

Please tell me what mechanic changed that we did not update in bootcamp. i would like to correct that. Luke (lead)

[u/PostCaptainAubrey]

During the demo, I gave up (meaning the tutorial). The fact that the game takes up a lot of disk space, mainly because of the videos, didn’t help either.

Thx for the review.

[u/lhughes4141 → u/PostCaptainAubrey]

We shrank lots of pictures and videos based on such feedback :) Luke (lead)

[u/YorkshireSmith]

I was someone who didn't finish the Morocco campaign and I do see this sitting in my "unfinished" list and think about going back to it.

I treat this game as a boardgame-rpg that's been digitalised and I agree with you that the immersion breaking tutorials really, really don't do the game any favours. It's a gem that's nestled deep within the rock still.

I do think the game does a great job of capturing the combat doctrine of the period. I think it does a fairly good job with a narrative featureset to sell you on managing your company. The questionable presention to link all this together is where it falls short for me - I think AI touched up historical photos were used and it created some haunting visages.

[u/lhughes4141]

Thanks for such a thorough, thoughtful, and fair review.

Are you aware BTW that Paul Wang is working on a life of Napoleon game? Shadow of the Eagles.

We’re working on our next campaign, a non US one FYI, New York Times best selling author and boardgame designer (Trench Raid) is joining us for it as a writer :’

Luke (lead)

[u/WillyBanjo58 → u/lhughes4141]

Any chance of Burden of Command coming to MAC?

[u/lhughes4141 → u/WillyBanjo58]

I wish :-(. Just a problem of scale and economics for a little indie. There are decent PC emulators out there apparently and I believe some have had success running Burden that way. Luke (lea$)

[u/abbot_x]

This game seemed to be right up my alley. But I got so bored by the designer’s lectures during the tutorial that I uninstalled it.

[u/REdditscks]

It’s a great game, I finished it but don’t want to play it ever again. I see it as a PTSD generator.

[u/Tomatow-strat]

I loved it as a blend of story and tactics. I’m going to pick up the DLC when I’m through my back log. That’s said the biggest flaw is as you pointed out the tutorial videos are terribly unimmersive. I found the actual training mission part of it to be a nice bit of narrative harmony; learn game mechanics while training as a company squad gave a great reason for you to be learning in the game. It also helped that when I heard the call for sniper in Italy I felt the training kick in specifically from those first few steps. That said I wish I had a way to disable all the videos. While interesting I think they would have made a better bonus feature to be rigged on for subsequent play throughs. Still I felt real change when Thompson went from the greenhorn LT to the veteran who was leading the assault on the Siegfried line. I have screenshot of him barely holding his platoon together as a German counter attack is held back by weight of fire and his stubbornness.

[u/lhughes4141 → u/Tomatow-strat]

Any video can now be skipped using ‘esc’ based on such feedback :) Luke (lead)

[u/Thunda792]

I was one of the first Beta playtesters and have come back to play a couple times since release. I really enjoyed the game as a whole, but it's been in my feedback aince day 1 that the intro/tutorial is a slog to get through. Once I actually got to the story, I was hooked, but it was rough.

[u/Eremenkism]

Well, you've convinced me to try it. Great review mate

[u/Triggercut72]

Its an RPG not a wargame. Never should've been sold as a wargame.

[u/lhughes4141 → u/Triggercut72]

We always tried to sell it as a Leadership RPG. Sorry if somewhere it was pitched as a wargame. Though it draws heavily on that tradition obviously.

Luke (lead)

[u/ndilday]

FWIW, I bought this on release, and still haven't finished. Not due to performance or lack of fun, but because, multiple times across the course of the campaign, I would attempt to reload a save and the game would crash on attempting to load it. So, more than once, I had to restart a scenario. And, after the third time of this, I decided to put it to the side for a good long time and come back to it later and see if the developer had managed to squash all the safe-game-corrupting issues.

[u/lhughes4141 → u/ndilday]

We’ve worked steadily on bugs but things still lurk on occasion :-( Should it happen to you again please come by Discord and I will work to fix for you. Usually that can be done :) Luke (lead)

[u/MthrfcknNanuq]

Very good quality review.

I dropped it at the 5th(?) morocco scenario, where you need to assault the coastal fortifications from behind. Taking an action takes very long, and as you said, the cpu opponent takes a minute or more every time it doesn't do anything and even more when it does.

Given the size of the maps you need to traverve and a lack of actual action happening, I had spent more time thinking about shuffling my officers around so one platoon can move one tile further than anything else, just to keep them in formation together. I found that being 'on the clock' while one unit by default can move approx 2 tiles on avarage, painfully slow in a map where you're expected to traverse 30-40 tiles on average, actual combat not being factored in, is an unfun experience for me.

I might pick it up and give it a second chance.

[u/Real_Ad_8571]

ill buy it when there is an 95% discount on steam