Looking back at it now, 2020 doesn’t feel like a banner year for strategy games, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few gems. The list below – gathered by a panel of experts and regularly updated – contains games from as recently as 12 months ago alongside classics from as far back as 28 years ago. They’re all games we think you could play and love right now.

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After watching the trailer a bajillion more times, I am extremely excited for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. It’s been around 48 hours since the announcement and I cannot possibly retain this state for much longer. By the time the Christmas-ish release date rolls around I will either have exploded like a poor little meat balloon, or gone full circle and lapsed into a coma. Like the engines of the Enterprise, she cannae hold – definitely not for around six more months, anyway.

Thank god that Vikings are an enduring and popular theme for games, then! I can inoculate myself against disaster by playing a few of these existing ones while I wait. Such is the versatility of Vikings that they pop up in almost every genre imaginable, too. So if, like me, you are already on the edge of your seat (and that seat is in a longship), here are some recommendations for varied and quality video games that will get you prepared for Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.

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For a time it looked as though strategy games had sunk into a kind of deathly malaise, unsure which territory to claim next and which ones it should leave well and truly alone. Fast forward to 2020, though, and strategy games have never looked healthier, which is why we’ve compiled this best strategy games list of all time. Whether you want to conquer the depths of space, wage historical warfare or hulk around in big mechanical robots, there’s a strategy game for you below.

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You’ll ocassionally find someone on the internet sounding off about how the strategy genre is dead. If you see such a person in the future, send them this list of the best strategy games ever made.

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Look! A ranking of the 50 best RPGs on PC. I know, you never asked for this, but here it is. It is 100 percent correct, we double-checked. The RPG is a broad and deep sea and fishing out the best games from its characterful waters is no easy task. But we are capable fishers on the good ship RPS, and know when to humanely throw back a tiddler or fight to heave up a monster. Enough of this salty metaphor. Here are the 50 best RPGs you can play on PC today.

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An idea I m happy to see the back of, is the notion that graphics is a one-way sliding scale towards photorealistic perfection. While I m certainly fond of games that exhibit hyperbudget beauty along the lines of Metro: Exodus or Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I m equally – probably more – excited by those who eschew realism in order to utterly master a particular aesthetic. Often, this takes the form of homage. Think Cuphead s take on surrealist 1930s cartoons, or Void Bastards comic book style. For my money though, nobody s done it quite like Stoic Studio, the developers behind The Banner Saga.

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We don t expect much of a typical video game map. As long as it guides us to our destination (and perhaps looks pretty while doing so) most of us won t waste a second thought on it. And yet, maps can be much more than tools that make our way from A to B a little more convenient. Some games reject the notion of maps as a tacked-on extraneous layer, and instead treat them as an integral part of their world. These maps can tell us something about their world and its inhabitants that goes far beyond topographical information. Rather than creating distance between us and a game, they root us more firmly in it.

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>Banners, then and now, are often a curious amalgamation of plain communication and naked aggression. They re well-known as heraldic devices, displaying a coat of arms to identify one side to the other on the battlefield, usually just before they were about to attack each other. However, they re also just a means of communicating who or what a place or thing belongs to. If you re shipwrecked, the flags on the boat responding to your frantic SOS can tell you where you are and who is about to rescue you. Even today, flags are used this way. Ships still use flag signalling to send messages without the need for radios. Warships still hoist battle ensigns, huge flags to stand out in the smoke and chaos of a pitched battle, showing that a ship is ready to fight, and which side it s on.

In The Banner Saga, every clan, including your own, has a banner that flies overhead as you travel. But there isn t as much talk about the clan’s actual, physical banner as there is about what it represents: forging unity from the lack thereof, creating a clan rather than fighting others, and the rite of passing on stories to later generations.

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From the outset, everything in The Banner Saga seems designed to encourage you to be careful. As you lead your caravan towards safety, you try to keep people alive by rationing food, managing the number of your followers and weighing the dangers of the unknown. Anyone who has ever given a soldier in XCOM a custom name knows that it takes very little to get attached, and The Banner Saga builds on this by giving you plenty of chances to get closer to the people in your army.

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The Vikings have long ago invaded the coasts of pop culture on their dragon-headed longships and carved out their own Danelaw in the realm of video games. In recent years, they ve grown even bolder, taking over most genres from RTS to RPG, classic point and click adventure to action, with an utter disregard towards distinctions between AAA and indie. They ve settled in Hellblade and Frostrune, Dead in Vinland and The Witcher 3, God of War and Crusader Kings 2, and of course, The Banner Saga trilogy. Luckily, it s easy to spot a Viking. Horned helmets, mead-filled drinking horns, bloody battle axes and grim miens are a dead giveaway. When in doubt, tempt the suspected Viking with loot, then wait and see whether or not they can resist the urge to pillage.

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