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Battle Brothers
Battle Brothers pairs demanding turn-based battles with the long-term work of leading a mercenary company: contracts, recruits, equipment, and character growth are yours to manage. At ≈ $4.34 from 
GOG, it suits players drawn to tactical choices and a solo campaign. Steam players rate it 87% from 26,279 reviews. At $8.99 from GOG, Battle Brothers offers a solo tactical RPG built around company management and turn-based combat.
All-time low ~ $7.71across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $4.702026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $8.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+91%
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
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01About Battle Brothers
Battle Brothers is a turn-based tactical RPG about leading a mercenary company across a procedurally generated fantasy world. Choose contracts, recruit fighters, and shape their equipment and skills as tactical battles, injuries, and limited supplies make each decision matter. Steam players rate it 87% from 26,279 reviews. English is listed as a supported language on Steam PC.
Credits
Developer
Overhype Studios
Publisher
Hooded Horse · Overhype Studios
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$4.702026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20
02Before you buy
Play mode
The Steam PC version is listed as single-player. Lead a mercenary company through a procedurally generated world and fight turn-based battles.
Language
English is listed for the Steam PC version, with subtitles and no full audio.
03Frequently asked questions
What do you do in Battle Brothers?
Manage a mercenary company, take contracts, and fight tactical turn-based battles.
What is procedurally generated?
The campaign map and recruits are procedurally generated.
Can I play solo?
Yes. The Steam PC listing includes single-player.
8.3
Overall Score
Graphics7.5
Audio7
Gameplay9.2
Story7.3
Content8.5
“Deep terrain interactions and mercenary management power this hardcore turn-based tactics RPG, delivering a procedurally generated campaign hampered by detached storytelling.”
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
I'm 64-years-old and I've played Battle Brothers 555 hours because it's a great game. Also because it's the only game that will run on the old computer in the nursing home. Each night I pray for a visit from either the Free Computer Fairy or the Sweet Angel of Death. Either is fine, really.Show moreShow less
555.8 hours at review535 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Dear Dev Team, I have had hundreds of hours happy gaming from BB so sincerely thank you for that. You have created a potential classic. The decision to announce no more additions or mod support to the game is causing serious reputation damage to your Studio. Reviews on Steam have turned from Overwhelmingly Positive to Mixed as a direct result and these factors are costing you serious sales for two reasons: Customers as less inclined to by a game that will not and cannot be expanded upon. Negative reviews discourage customers. It is also impacting your sales potential for next project as the customer base you have worked so hard to establish is turning hostile (Have a read about concept of Net Promoter Score NPS). Its never too late to reverse an incorrect decision. Please could I respectfully ask that you reconsider the decision to not offer future content and Mod support? Its not too late, customers expect mistakes, it’s how companies deal with them that counts. I still believe you can win back customer support and trust. And you will then see sales start to grow again. Thanks for listening and maintaining an open mind.Show moreShow less
25.9 hours at review294 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Every fight can be won. Some fights, you lost before they began. These two statements do not contradict one another.Show moreShow less
258.1 hours at review250 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
An extremely hyped game that boils down to this: 1) Go to a settlement and accept a contract for your mercenary band (you can't have more than one active contract at a time) 2) Do what the contract says (go there and kill that, alternatively go there and take this with you) 3) Go back to the settlement where you've accepted the contract, collect your payment and sell the loot 4) Use the money to hire more mercenaries for your warband and upgrade the equipment of your mercenaries 5) Rinse and repeat My 18 hour experience of the game consisted solely of these 5 steps. You will occasionally run into a random event like encountering a wanderer on the roads who tells you some stuff that doesn't effect gameplay or two of your mercenaries may end up in a fist fight and one receives a minor wound for one ingame day. I've never had any random event that influenced my plans in any way, nor do I think that there is any. The "influence system" is one of the most hyped things - and I don't get what there's to hype about. There are a dozen or so settlements on the map and three major "houses" that own these settlements (about 4 each). If you do jobs for a settlement or a house, you increase your influence with said settlement or house. If you do something to piss them off, you'll lose influence with them. That said, even when I reached the maximum influence level with a settlement or a house, the effects where underwhelming at best. A settlement may have better prices for you "on average", but random events, that effect settlements and don't have anything to do with your influence, are much stronger when it comes to prices. You will have better prices in a settlement that is under the effect of a positive random event although you have only "neutral" influence on it than you will have in another settlement, with which you are "very friendly", but which is not effected by a positive random event. Random events that influence settlements happen very often, so it may be that you will have slightly better prices on average in settlements with which you have a high influence level, but that difference will be minimal. All in all, the influence system is another thing you don't need to care about. You move your warband in real time over the strategy map but play in turn-based mode when it comes to battle. The battle system is okay. You have to keep an eye on the ammo of your ranged fighters, your equipment may break, different enemies are prone to different tactics and so on. All in all not bad. That said, I steamrolled the game with a setup consisting of 3 archers, 1 standard bearer and the rest of my men used shields/spears. Spear wall is op. The RNG has way to much impact on the outcome though. The (few short) stories you get to read while playing are nicely written. The sound is unobtrusive. I've encountered only one bug and it wasn't game-breaking. I had no crashes. You can't raid settlements, can't conquer lands or any kind of structures, can't own a headquarter. There's no diplomacy system except for that influence thingy I've mentioned above which is neglectable. There are no quests or quest lines, except for the contracts you take (go there, kill that, finished). There's no character or group development in a roleplaying sense, only raising stats and picking perks. Take a look at the five steps that I've listed at the beginning of the review and know that's what you will do for the entire time. Overall I would hesitantly recommend to buy Battle Brothers IF you can get it at a hefty discount as 28 € is waaaaay to much for a game that has nothing new or special to offer and could easily be a mobile port. 10 € would be fair IF... ...IF... ...they wouldn't have messed up the ending. That is: There is no ending. The devs obviously (and erroneously) thought that their game has enough to offer to be considered an open-end sandbox game like Mount&Blade and the like. Of course it's not. Repeating the five steps that I've mentioned at the beginning over and over and over again (there is literally nothing else to do) doesn't make this game a new Mount&Blade. Not even close. It took me 18 hours of grind to finally give in and look up in Google how the game is supposed to end...and then it comes out that there is no end. What kind of bad joke is this? Of course you see some progress with forming your warband and so on, but that progress gets smaller and smaller and there literally is nothing "big and exciting" that waits for you. There are so called late game crisis, but you don't have that much effect on them and basically they just mean a temporary change in the composition of enemies you have to fight. The crisis will end sooner or later, no matter if you've been digging your nose or fighting for your life. PS: Three downvotes within 2 minutes after the review has been released. The fanboys are strong with this one. Or maybe someone wants to make sure no negative review gets near the top of the review list...Show moreShow less
16.6 hours at review284 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Goblins are horrible, horrible creatures that will clown on your mercenaries at every given moment, which makes cleaving 3 of them with a longsword swing so very cathartic. Oh, and the game is good. Savescum like the unrepentant criminal you are; it's still a blast.Show moreShow less
37.6 hours at review247 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I've hesitated to write this review for quite a long time. Despite having a mostly negative opinion about it since its release in 2017, I just couldn't get myself to form it into a review, because... this game actually has A LOT of things going for it: 1) The visuals are rather unique - well-drawn dark fantasy with clearly recognizable classic references and tropes. Actors have multiple layers for wounds, degraded equipment, and gore. World map is clean, clutterless, and strikes a great balance between simultaneously being realistically dull on your mundane trips and exciting when you explore the unmapped corners of the world. 2) The raw amount of content (mercenary backgrounds, equipment, enemies, skills and perks, quests, cataclysms, etc) is very respectable, especially with content DLCs. 3) The overall concept of the game (mercenary band sandbox) is mostly unexplored by the industry - I struggle to name similar games without heavy generalizations (like Mount and Blade, XCOM, Xenonauts, etc). 4) The writing, while being a rather small part of the game, was not neglected, and it really shows. On paper, this game has everything to grab you by the neck and pull you into its world, robbing you of dozens of hours of free time. And it does so for some players (as is shown by 86% of positive reviews at the time of this review). At first and second look, it is a very good game. And it is. It just doesn't click with me (and with a bunch of other strategy lovers, as can be seen in other detailed negative reviews). And since this game is not in dire need of positive reviews, I will leave a negative one as a cautionary tale to other strategy enthusiasts, seeking to scratch the “xcomy” itch. Here it goes. 1) A tale of “BAD RNG” While a majority of short and less detailed negative reviews cite “bad RNG” as a reason for their negative attitude towards the game, I respectfully disagree. True, unadulterated RNG is… neutral. 40% accuracy swing (a rough baseline for most untrained troops in this game) is more likely to miss than hit. Such is math. And missing 3 times in a row, while feeling bad and unfair, has a roughly 22% chance of happening – which is a lot. What makes this RNG “bad” is the lack of instruments to counter bad outcomes. What happens in XCOM, when enemy crits your soldier, leaving him panicked and on low health? Well, you usually have a lot of options to deal with this situation, depending on what you brought to the table – suppressive fire, flashbangs, smoke screens, taunts, destroying enemy’s cover in a gamble to kill him in 1 turn, healing your wounded soldier up to give him a chance to survive another hit. And while not all those tools guarantee you a happy ending, you at least have some say on how the situation proceeds to unfold. What happens in Battle Brothers, when enemy crits your soldier, leaving him panicked and on low health? Well, he probably dies, unless you have the capacity to wrap up the whole engagement in one turn. There is very little you can actually do, once your line is engaged with the enemy. Even if you kill the enemy who caused this, there are usually others next to him, who will either take his place and finish the job or can already attack diagonally from their current position. Roughly speaking, you can: a) clear the whole flank so that nobody can come over and finish off your soldier in one turn, giving him time to retreat – this requires a lot of DPS output which is often either unavailable on low levels or is also necessary elsewhere. b) Use the push\pull actions of some weapons and shields – unreliable (subject to RNG), hinders your damage output and rarely helps - it just postpones the inevitable. c) Use the “swap positions” ability which requires a perk point, spends time and is not available on low levels. It’s not the RNG itself that is or feels bad. It’s the brutal and deterministic helplessness that makes engagements feel bad and unfair. This problem is further exacerbated by: 2) Lack of tactical depth and overwhelming power of meta builds. It’s that simple. 80% of your fights happen in tactically neutral environments (grasslands with small 1-2 tile “hills”), where all you can really do is form a line, exchange ranged attacks and lock in melee combat – while fun for a few fights, this gets old fast and will not change until you start encountering special types of enemies or get Lone Wolf supercombatants in your party. a) Height advantage is nice to have but rarely can be utilized in a meaningful and truly impactful manner unless you fight in the mountains. b) Flanking is usually out of the question – at least in the early game, when you are usually at least matched in numbers with your enemy (and almost never actually outnumber them). This is less true in the late game, when you rock a bigger party and have juiced up dedicated Lone Wolfs that seek isolation on the flanks. c) Other types of terrain don’t bring anything to the table – the average challenge to your tactical genius usually comes down to recognizing an opportunity to force your enemy to fight in shallow water by standing on the neighboring dry tile or finding a way to use a tree and a bush to shorten your frontline. Not terribly exciting. 3) Frontloaded challenge. Issues I described above are, unfortunately, especially painful and obvious at the start of the game. The lack of meaningful instruments to deal with unfavorable RNG outcomes becomes less acute once you get the beefy gear and are less punished by incoming hits. The lack of tactical depth somewhat dissipates once you specialize your soldiers – but the problem of some builds being objectively better then others arises, still somewhat diluting the depth of the game. Problem is – not a lot of players have the stomach to carry on through the hardships to see the game slightly improving down the line. First impressions matter. And I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of players who will never touch this game again because they were brutally burned in the first few hours of gameplay – even if they would otherwise enjoy it at the later stages and would play it for hundreds of hours. And every time I’m trying to get back to this game, I instantly get a harsh reminder of why I stopped playing last time. This is a shame, because the game is otherwise pretty solid. The only other game I have similar feelings about is Darkest Dungeon – which also suffers from the same issues despite being a superb game. All that said, I’m still glad that this game exists and I hope that the next project of this devteam will be a banger. They have all the tools and talent to pull it off, hopefully they got enough experience with BB.Show moreShow less
61.7 hours at review206 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I am Chinese. I use the translator to talk with the author now because I want the author to understand that this game is great. This is all I want. I love you because you have created the world I wantShow moreShow less
0.1 hours at review238 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
A lot of the negative reviews came from the game's RNG system. Many people described it as broken, unfair and unbalanced, while there are a lot of others claimed the system was fair, balanced and had been tested to death. You don't need to believe both sides, from my point of view both of them are correct, and you can buy the game and test it by yourself. The most important thing is that you need to feel FUN when you play a game. (I quitted after playing ~100 hours, just because it's not fun anymore) Based on my data, this game's RNG system is not broken, but is unfair. Let me explain: (1) If you have played XCOM, you will find its RNG system is more close to what you expect. But in fact, the XCOM's RNG is skewed toward the player, because this is a balance between player's real world and the virtual game world. Because what players care is only their OWN team. Imaging there are 100 mercenary groups on the map (1 is yours and 99 are game generated) and there are endless monsters to fight. What players want is that they can keep playing the game to the end, and their team be the standing out one, surviving to the last moment. This 100% player's expectancy, in math world, is 1%. You see the gap here? You don't care about other mercenary groups, right? But Battle Brothers treat your team the same as the others, even they are CPU generated. (2) Now run your Excel, type in =RANDARRAY(1000, 100, 1, 100, TRUE). Now you get a table of random numbers. What this means is that you have a 100-face dice, you roll it 1000 times, collect the data, and do this test again, and repeat it 100 times. These are numbers what random numbers should look like. If you roll a 100-face dice 1000 times, you will have a mean of 50, or very close to it, such as 48.82 or 51.29. Very occasionally you will get a mean like 42.37, but this will be very very very uncommon. The deviation from 50, is actually very narrow. If you plot a distribution of these means (you have 100, because you repeat the test 100 times), you will get a "normal distribution", with the center located at 50. (3) Now check the distribution of every number. If you roll a 100-sided dice 1000 times, you can expect that most of the numbers will be rolled 10 times. Some of them may have appeared 9 or 11 times, even 8 or 12 times, but overall they will approach 10. Very occasionally a number may only get rolled 2 times, or luckily 18 times, but this will be uncommon. The distribution of these numbers of "numbers of getting rolled", will also be a "normal distribution". (4) In Excel 2003, the RAND function used the Wichman & Hill algorithm for generating pseudo-random numbers. Starting with Excel 2010, the Mersenne Twister MT19937 (32-bit) algorithm is being used. As you know, the MT system, is used by the RNG system of Battle Brothers. That means, they should be the same. (5) Now record every RNG number in your fights when you play Battle Brothers. You can record only yours, only the enemies, but not both. For RNG calculation, you have a fixed number (that's the hit roll, the final value calculated from the basic hit roll and many modifiers, of your or your enemy's attack) and a random number (randomly generated by the RNG system, to beat the former fixed number). We want the random numbers, not the fixed numbers. In every fight, generally you can record more than 100 values, so 10 fights are enough to make a preliminary conclusion. If you want to do it quickly, you can use Cheat Engine to lock the fatigue and the action points of your brothers, so that you can regenerate these numbers quickly. (6) Do a t-test to see if your distribution can be tell from the Excel distribution. Based on my data, I have a 99.99% confidence to say that these two systems are different. In Battle Brothers, some minor algorithms are applied so the numbers are slightly skewed toward both sides, so that encouraging very lucky and very unlucky events to occur. But this modification, based on my data, applies equally to you and your enemies. (7) But why can a system applying equally to both sides be called unfair? Because in Battle Brothers the developer did not take the factor "weight" into consideration. This makes the game more challenging and this is the base different that distinguish Battle Brothers from XCOM. Things with same incidence do not mean they bear the same weight (or, significance). In business, we call this risk management. For a high-level team, being extremely unlucky versus being extremely lucky bears different weights. The benefit gained from being extremely lucky is minimal. It may result in a battle you originally need 20 turns to beat with some mild to moderate injuries into a battle you beat in 10 turns without any injury. That's nothing. However, the weight of being extremely unluckly is heavy, you may lose an important brother and ruin your whole team. It is, the benefits you get from being extremely lucky, even several times, do not match the weight of ONE single loss of being extremely unlucky. An enemy being extremely unlucky? You don't care, right? But what if an enemy being extremely lucky? The same rule applies here. Why you want to play an unfair game? Because, brothers, the real world is cruel and the same unfair. Fair worlds only exist in dreams and in games. In real world, you don't bear the same weight as those rich people, right? So, you must change your mind when playing Battle Brothers. The game mechanism treats your team the same as any other CPU team. You are going to fail anyway. The soul of Battle Brothers lies in the STORY you build around your team brothers, not lies in beating the game to the end. There is no end in this game, just memories.Show moreShow less
140.9 hours at review196 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Seven days. That doesn't seem like a long time, but seven days ago Hilderich was a founder of the Poor Sods mercenary company, an axe weiding terror who once beheaded three men in one battle, but this morning, he's a rotting corpse with his skull split down the middle. Anton the Brave, he's now Anton the deceased. Good ol' Bjarne, a beggar who signed on for a chance at something better was gutted and bled out as he begged for just one more breath. Steinar fared no better, his blonde head was cleaved from his sturdy farmhand shoulders. That's a lot of blood for one week. Who knows, maybe the dead are the lucky ones. The rest of us knit our busted bones and stitch severed muscles nearly starving on a gray paste of grain and water. Of course some wounds can't be fixed with bandages and a bowl of gruel, poor Robert the Juggler took a pick to the head that scrambled his eggs and hasn't been the same since. Yes, we have a a juggler on our fighting line. As I write that, I realize that we're barely a mercenary company at all. We've only two soldiers in the whole group. The rest: a brain-damaged juggler, a gravedigger drunkard, a fisherman, an apprentice of questionable loyalty and a cripple with no ears. Our gear is the broken bits we scavenge from the bodies of our enemies, or post-mortem hand me downs from our own fallen brothers. But despite our dearth of battle-ready fighters and our rummage sale gear, we've somehow got another contract. Another benefactor with clean skin and white clothes who'll pay our rusty asses 400 crowns to murder some nearby inconvenient thugs. My share of the 400 isn't enough to get me out, but maybe they've a cache of gold to loot, or captured princess to rescue. You know, with just a few more contracts and a few lucky breaks; I could turn this bunch over to Niels or Rumar, buy Robert a new set of juggling balls and retire somewhere green and quiet. Poor Sods form up! We're off to battle.Show moreShow less
12.2 hours at review180 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I really, really, REALLY wish there was NEUTRAL option for leaving reviews. This game is definitely in the bittersweet/neutral review category. My biggest complaint with this game is that it feels like an unadorned shell of a game. If you're familiar with strategy title gurus, Paradox Interactive, it feels like one of their games on release - which is to say that the game is perfectly functional, but the experience is completely vapid like the developers were planning on making the base game a vehicle for future expansions & DLC. Unfortunately, however, the developers of Battle Brothers have flat-out said that they have zero intention of ever working on the game again beyond bug fixing and balancing. They've even explained that the game would be too difficult to change to allow modding. As far as the experience you get while playing the game as is now...well, prepare for a campaign in redundancy. You have your mercenary band, travel from point of interest to settlements, take contracts, hire new mooks, buy/sell supplies, go to contract destination, fight enemies, complete contract (or not), rinse and repeat. - There are simply not enough events to keep things interesting - The UI is clunky and ugly - Other than tooltips, there isn't some kind of economy screen that gives detailed breakdowns of expenses - resources (food, tools, ammo, medical supplies) consumed per day - The end-game crises are unoriginal and uninteresting - There isn't enough variation in the game (map, enemies, events, contracts, gear, trading, gameplay options, ect,) - The battle map has no way to rotate, so good luck placing your troops in the correct hex, not to mention determining if the elevation is going to work in your favor - Pray to RNGesus - No modding - Not enough and no new content (READ: expansions) - No diplomacy - No economic game (other than buy from X, sell to Y). Sorta counter-intuitive when you are controlling a merc band... - End-game crises are bland. It's like ending a long-term relationship with you significant other over dinner with the dollar menu at McDonalds - The music and ambient noises (especially in settlements) are repetitve AF! There seems to be only one track that plays regardess of the size or situation of the settlement you frequent. ******** Despite the negative points I've collated, the game IS relatively fun at times. There have been numerous analogies comparing Battle Brothers to the like of XCOM. That's mostly faulty. Battle Brothers is more in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, Tactics Ogre, Disgaea in terms of the tactical battles and the 3/4 birds-eye view of the world map. I very much enjoy tactics RPGs, and seeing that Battle Brothers definitely fits that bill, it would follow that I also enjoy Battle Brothers. I do and have enjoyed this title, but there was a definitely threshold that was breached where the repetition became too annoying to tune out and the newness wore off to show mediocrity. ********* ++++++EDIT+++++ Following the news of a new expansion on horizon (http://battlebrothersgame.com/beasts-exploration-dlc-announcement/), I will amend this review after its release, accordingly. ++++++++++++++Show moreShow less
29.2 hours at review176 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.