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Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga
The appeal is in planning an army: assemble squads from varied classes, then weigh terrain, weather, and morale before battles play out automatically. At 
Kinguin, Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga costs ≈ $0.78; its confirmed tracked low makes this a fitting time to start if a tactical solo campaign suits you. Squads can include up to nine soldiers, and the many classes leave room to shape your force around your preferred approach. At Kinguin, the game costs ≈ $0.78, while its current Steam price is $6.99.
KinguinSymphony of War: The Nephilim Saga Steam CD Key
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GGselSymphony of War: The Nephilim Saga РФ+СНГ+ВЕСЬ МИР Steam КЛЮЧCredit/Debit Cardfrom~ RUB 74.65Buy nowAll-time low ~ $5.59across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyHistorical Low~ $0.922026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $19.99Kinguinvs. Historical Low+2073%
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.
01About Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga
In Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga, you lead an army as an academy graduate caught in a rebellion in Tahnra. Assemble squads from varied classes and use terrain, weather, and morale as battles unfold automatically. Steam PC players rate it 94%% positive across 12,938 reviews.
Credits
Developer
Dancing Dragon Games
Publisher
Dancing Dragon Games
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$0.922026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
Show 6 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
How it plays
The Steam PC game is a single-player, turn-based strategy RPG. Squad battles play out automatically.
Army building
Build squads from more than 50 classes, with up to nine soldiers in each squad.
Language
English and Simplified Chinese have full audio; other supported languages have subtitles.
03Frequently asked questions
What kind of game is it?
You lead an army through a turn-based campaign, planning maneuvers across battlefields.
Do I control soldiers directly in battle?
Individual squad battles resolve automatically; your role is to plan and position your forces.
What is the story about?
The story begins with a rebellion against the Veridian Empire in the world of Tahnra.
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
Terrible game. You can't romance Diana, the hot muscle waifu. Edit: I talked to the developer who personally apologized to me and will have this fixed this next patch. Great game.Show moreShow less
4.2 hours at review649 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
I still intend to play some more and may update this if feelings change due to either updates or more experience, but I want to get my initial thoughts down because I'd've definitely appreciated such a warning from someone else. The things I expected to love (the squad system) I did, but almost everything else managed to disappoint. IF YOU HAVE A 1440 OR 4K MONITOR, PLEASE CONSIDER THIS - the game is basically only available in 720p. Everything is clunky upscales that look jagged and all-around awful. Someone on the discord was kind enough to offer me a way to make it look only "sorta bad"... via a third party download and messing around with a .ini. I appreciate that I could at least play the game without my eyes bleeding, but I consider needing to take such a measure to be completely unacceptable with a full release in 2022 and would pretty much negatively recommend for that alone. That said, it's far from my only issue with the game. The UI is not... good. Doubly so if you're using Mouse and Keyboard, which many grid-based tactical RPG have ranged from "fantastic accomodation" of Disgaea to "pretty decent at least" of Fell Seal. This is not that. No tooltips, extremely hard to parse buttons in some submenues, lots of unnecessary extra clicks and un-clicks and re-clicks to get around menues. You'll spend a chunk longer buried in troop micromangement than you'd ever need to just because of a lack of a myriad of possible conveniences and shortcuts. The visuals are weak. Setting aside the absolutely awful art quality due to upscaling a game that's entirely function at a resolution a lot of people's phones have improved past, units just look... fine? The art style isn't super distinct, your hero characters don't even get a unique color pallette (seriously, the first healer lady you get has vivid red hair in the portrait and her model is just a soft blonde). The game isn't a few weeks of tweaks underbaked. This should've been an early access release, and it should've been in early access for 6+ months while all of the iteration and feedback processing necessary to make the game run and play comfortably on various devices was done. I don't know whether the game has come out as it does due to project mismanagement, financial pressure, publisher fiat or what, but either way, this would be "kind of not in a great place, come back later" is it was Early Access. Since they're calling this a full release, I'm judging it as one. I ran into a lot of day-one issues that I expect to be fixed quickly, but there's a lot of deep flaws that certainly won't be for a while, if ever. The story is nothing remarkable, I haven't seen any characters I grew remotely attached to (oh, good, a paladin lady with boob armor, yay, I love having those in every fantasy setting </s>) or any of that. Big Empire, sinister dude making power grab, yada yada. Ancient evil conspiracy. Chosen ones. ------- So why did I say I'd still play it? The gameplay does have some deep promise in it. I'm not a fan of a lot of the fire-emblem-y cruft around character conversations or stat growths or whatnot, but the core choices - how you set up your squads with leaders and followers - do you want generalist squads with some healers and archers thrown around? Have an all-archer squad and an all-melee squad? These are genuinely all valid choices with different merits on different maps and a lot of subtle mechanics that help make it feel like you have a lot of options. Maps alternate between being a bit more open or a bit more closed to encourage both generalist squads (swarm enemies in the open) to specialist ones (have your all-melee squad in a hallway followed by an all-ranged one, for instance). Sadly, the enemy AI is kind of... ultradumb... so often it'll be more 'plan around them doing the simple, stupid thing of rushing striaght at you with ranged units into melee combat' but it still manages to be rewarding when you planned out your in-combat healing, out-of-combat healing and all that to line up so you deny your enemy kills on their turn only to have achain of actions open up spots in the enemy line to take out a bunch all in a row. There's a truly good core of a tactical RPG with a powerful gimmick in its squad construction that shifts a lot of paradigms. Just a bit of a shame about *literally everything else*. But I still hope that I can get some fun out of that core, becaue it really is promising. I'd love to see this game become its best self someday, or failing that, for some devs with more time to work to take on a similar project and bring it to fruition where the grand scale of how many soldiers amidst squads you put together isn't bogged down by having to control all of them with a very clunky UI.Show moreShow less
6.5 hours at review93 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
As a life-long fan of Fire Emblem, Langrisser, Shining Force and other strategy games of the same ilk, it irks me that a game like this can come along out of nowhere, punch you in the throat and force-feed to you its compelling ideas in such a convincing and comprehensive thesis, in spite of your protests. I first bought into this game expecting, from the screenshots, little more than a mostly functional strategy time-waster with a retro-aesthetic. Instead, what I found was a deeply engrossing and coherent army management sim that punches far above its weight class, and offers up more depth and choice than many of its modern counterparts. Instead of spending hours in the strategic map, most of my time playing this game has been spent staring at the squad management page obsessing over unit formations, juggling squad artifact loadouts, and tweaking various micro-optimisations. Every single map, I find myself itching to return back to this page to see what new options have been made available to me following my latest conquests. While I'm sitting at my desk at work, I muse to myself whether my Mother of Dragons could maybe use some bulkier front-line heroes to shore up the defences on her brood of far-too-cute dragon riders; while I'm sitting on the can, I idly ponder whether my invulnerable giantess could perhaps use a couple of shameful assassins in her regiment to assist with her flaccid offence. Thoughts such as these consume many of my waking moments - and to be clear - I would have it no other way. It's not all sunshine and rainbows, though. At the time of writing, the game suffers from many minor issues. An occasionally cumbersome interface with multiple nested menus, critical information that is buried deep within the interface, a somewhat counter-intuitive affinity system that is difficult to get to grasp with initially, sporadically uneven difficulty, inconsistent writing and a limp bond system, to name a few. It's also missing repeatable scenarios and new game+ (both things which the incredibly patient and communicative developer, who deserves every success, has promised is high on their list of post-launch priorities). But in spite of these mild annoyances, I find myself spending hours agonising over whether or not I should make my newest mage launch his spell attacks in a row, or heavens forbid, a column instead; or whether my latest hire would better express his prejudices through the medium of a pointy stick or a zweihander - and I know that it's all been worth it.Show moreShow less
26 hours at review273 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
It hurts to give this a thumbs down. The battle system is fun: as many have said, in battles, squad management, and unit progression, this is a reasonable Ogre Battle clone. For those of us who dearly loved the original, that feels damn good. But it's not all good. I suspect all the positive ratings are coming from how addictive the squad management can be, overlooking glaring problems everywhere else. --- Interface --- The game badly needs quality of life updates to make reviewing & managing your army of up to 200 units easier. Notice how many reviewers talk about how much time they spent screwing around with their squads? That's partly because the interface for it is missing some basic features. I originally learned to use a spreadsheet because of Ogre Battle - but there's no reason this game should have an interface that's worse than the SNES classic from 30 years ago. Examples: - No way to sort or filter artifacts, of which you will acquire 100+. You will often want to sort by capacity cost, so you can fit in the best buff, but there's no way to do so. Other times, you'll want to make sure you're equipping all available artifacts, but there's no way to filter by unequipped either. - There is also no option to sort all units by a given stat, for instance. Pretty disappointing if I want to find the best front-line defender, or the units with the highest leadership. - You cannot scroll through the status screen of units in a squad, which should be an obvious feature. - Even once you've figured out which unit has that sweet defensive trait and want to make them the center defender, you better remember which of the 4 identical looking horsemen they are, because the interface won't tell you the stats or name of the unit you've selected to rearrange within the squad (nor the unit they're replacing). - You cannot change the leader within a squad, so if you want to class change the current leader, you probably have to disband the entire squad first since you're going to be class changing them down into a non-leader class on the way to the class you want. - There is no way to see what attacks a class can use from a unit's status screen or the class change screen. You have to navigate out to the tutorial menu and scroll through all available classes, then select the class and scroll to the bottom of its description in order to see that information. It may seem weird to lead with interface gripes, but I'd argue one of the core joys of this game (like Ogre Battle) is optimizing: pulling squads apart and letting a badass generic unit who has been with your leader since day 1 lead their own squad because they've quietly developed an unexpectedly huge leadership stat. Alternatively, realizing a rogue has weird stats and would be more effective class changed to a soldier or vice versa. --- Difficulty --- The default difficulty is very easy, which drains the fun out of managing the army. What's the point of all that optimizing if you can stomp everything without it? Regarding Perma-Death as a difficulty lever: I love perma-death in almost all games, but it feels very out of place in this game since all targeting in combat is random. Since you can still revive for almost no money as long as you do so before the chapter ends (assuming the map has a temple), perma-death mostly just slows the game down as you queue your squads up to revive before finishing a map. Also, in a game where the joy is watching everyone grow organically, having the faceless generic units become literal cannon fodder while the named units become gods and have invincible plot armor really highlights how juvenile the story is. Unlike Ogre Battle, placement within the squad doesn't impact what attacks a class uses, which is a bit disappointing. The tutorial mentions that morale only grants Free Actions to player squads, but I have seen enemy units take free actions as well. Bug? Artifacts that increase capacity get a buff from the tech that reduces the cost of equipping artifacts, but 0-cost artifacts are unchanged. Bug? --- Story --- 2 out of 5. Which is probably be too generous: by chapter 19, I was too embarrassed by the story to keep playing and uninstalled the game despite still feeling hooked by the squad mechanics. Looking at the Metacritic ratings, I seriously question the standards of the reviewers. I'm not sure how anyone out of their teens could rate this story a 3/5, much less the 4/5 several gave it. Did any of these people actually play Ogre Battle, Tactics Ogre, or any of the other games that preceded this in the genre? Writing ranges from mediocre to insultingly bad. Several scenes serve little to no purpose. Most characters feel paper thin, which makes the support conversations absolute cringe. I kept trying, but had to skip through them more often than not. Midway through the game, after you've been effortlessly crushing everyone there is a tedious scripted loss chapter that ends with your character being killed. From that point on, the plot and script get progressively worse. It really does feel (and look) like the RPG Maker games I wrote back in high school 20 years ago. The main character is the worst kind of Mary Sue, and it only gets worse as the game progresses, with them literally descending from the heavens to deus ex machina the whole plotline, but only once every other character has decided to sit down and die. Utter rubbish. And I'm ranting now, but sometimes, at important times, basic details make no sense and completely undercut the narrative. Example: At one point the (remaining) protagonists make a last ditch effort to break into a sewer beneath the enemy's stronghold, all in order to teleport one character to a holy mountain somewhere. (This makes no more sense in-game than it does here - there are no teleporters or mention of any of this until moments before this mission begins. The mission is based on a scrap of paper none of them can even read that they've been sitting on for 2 years. Ok...) But it gets worse: just after seeing character 1 on the mountain for days, we see another character somewhere else far away in an unexplained scene... then, days later, without explanation, that 2nd character also shows up on the distant mountain somehow... He sits down with the first and gives up, an indeterminate amount of time passes... and then baddies show up as well! For some reason, THIS exact moment is when the main character returns as a god. It was all a pile of insultingly pointless breaks in continuity, and the fact that this was a climactic story beat we'd spent 1/3 of the game waiting for at that point made it unbearable. They took a reasonable (if too easy) game and absolutely cratered it. I desperately wish they'd gotten a more mature writer to better complement the fun gameplay systems. --- Summary --- In short, this game has a core system that is extremely addictive, but it lacks the sophistication in game balance & writing to make it something I can recommend. Would I play & recommend a sequel with improved interface and balance, written by someone else? In a heartbeat.Show moreShow less
22.6 hours at review86 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
I played this game while it was in beta, and klokked in over 100 hours. I played not only on the medium difficulty, but the highest difficulty, on permadeath. Ultimately, I didn't get to beat the game, as the beta ended early, but I made it to chapter 29/31 and so I saw the vast majority of what Symphony of War had to offer. I'm Klokinator, a 20 year veteran of the Fire Emblem and Advance Wars scene. I have played a lot of turn based tactical strategy games. While I may not put Symphony of War in the #1 spot, it's definitely in the top 3 for me, right after Fire Emblem 7 and 8. That's a high compliment, as those are my favorite strategy games of all time. SoW is a game that emphasizes squads over individual units. You place down a Leader Unit, and their LDR score indicates your squad's Capacity. If your Leader's LDR is 50, your squad has a capacity of 50, with each squaddie you add ranging from 8-12 cost. Then, you place them down and try to maximize your damage effectiveness, the order your units attack when engaging enemies, and so on. By having a Leader Unit, you still get the identity of solo characters like in Fire Emblem, but their squad mates are effectively that character's fully customizable 'stat spread.' By the end of the game, you can and will absolutely have leaders with Nine Man Squads, which is the maximum number of units you can fit in the 3x3 grid range. But even when you only have 4 or 5 units in your early squads, this presents a lot of tactical opportunity. Do you roll with two archers behind three heavies, emphasizing small hit-and-run chip damage with the occasional melee clash? Do you roll with five horses to race around the map and claim objectives while avoiding enemies with polearms? (Polearms grant extra damage against cavalry) Do you place down one polearm unit and surround him with other units to maximize his Polearm buff that boosts ally attack and damage, or do you put 5 polearm units all next to one another to stack their power scaling? Just squad composition alone is its own metagame. But by the time you reach Chapter 3 and 4 and beyond, you also start getting lots of Artifacts. These grant squad-wide bonuses that can greatly change how individual squads function. You can give one squad vampirism at the cost of losing max HP each turn, or you can make a squad always attack first so the enemy loses their attack bonus! The gameplay of SoW is truly incredible. It is deep, replayable, and I've already sunk 100 hours into it. As for the story of the game... it's pretty good! I wouldn't say it's my favorite ever, but it's plenty enjoyable and has some truly touching moments. The cinematic maps and cutscenes have a classic SNES feel to them, and the characters don't just walk around, but actively strike at one another, make jabbing motions, and so on. The story is, ahem, VERY reminiscent of Fire Emblem 4 The Holy War, so if you liked that game's story, you'll definitely like this one. As for the music, I personally turned it off, so I have no strong opinion. I listened to techno the whole time, but the music sounded fine. It just wasn't my cup of tea. A lot of people complain about the character artwork. Personally, I think it looks good! It's not my favorite artstyle, but the characters all look good, and some look truly great. My favorite character is Beatrix, a sassy mage who can annihilate entire battlefields all on her own via firestorms of wrath. This game is a true gem. The developers are already starting to work on big updates and additions for the game, so if you want to experience the best SRPG since pre-modern Fire Emblem, check it out! You'll find tactical options aplenty! One last thing! If you do buy this game, keep an eye out for a special mercenary called "Kutthroat Klok," an Assassin with Treasure Hunter and Thievery. You'll be rolling in the dough if you buy my merc!Show moreShow less
107 hours at review258 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
The gameplay is fine. It's more about army management than actual tactics or strategy. The story? Awful. There is a bad guy. We must kill him. We are the good guys. God says so. It doesn't even need a story, but it forces you through slog after slog of completely useless, boring, and forgettable dialogue. Advance Wars knew to never do more than 5 sentences at a time. Take a hint, Symphony. Either have good writing or get out of the way. But the UI? Awful, terrible, bad, horrible, die, die, die, whoever designed this should never be allowed near a computer again. Plays like a SNES game instead of a modern PC game. Doing simple tasks requires 12+ clicks. I have a unit I want to upgrade. First, let me check their stats. (5 clicks). Okay they need a little boost to magic to get promoted. (6 clicks). Oh I don't have a magic gem, but I do have some extra iron, I'll convert it. (10 clicks). Then back to the character to promote them. (8 clicks). And just like that, a simple character promotion has taken almost 30 clicks, going through 5 different menus. Now, consider that process for your entire army. The whole workflow is unnecessarily convoluted and painful. It massively inflates play-time because you spend more time bouncing from menu to menu than you actually do playing. Also there's this weird forced grinding system where you can't afford all the upgrades you want unless you do a little arena fight. Neat at first, then you realize you need to do that exact same arena fight 5 more times. Gross. All in all, not good. Could be passable if the UI were made for modern humans and the writer was aware that they are not a good writer.Show moreShow less
47.5 hours at review64 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Too many kids these days comparing this to Fire Emblem. And while it's not a terrible comparison, a better comparison is to games like Ogre Battle. And if you liked the Ogre Battle series of games, you'll enjoy Symphony.Show moreShow less
22.4 hours at review235 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
It breaks my heart to give Symphony of War a thumbs down, because it's clearly a passion project from an enthusiastic and attentive indie developer. I want people to play this game and support the developer, but I was disappointed by Symphony of War's execution in almost every meaningful way. I'm going to get the "indie game" criticisms out of the way: The art is extremely mismatched, the writing is rough and uneven, the UI is very clunky, the game doesn't handle resolution scaling well, the voice acting is awkward, deeper gameplay mechanics are largely unexplained, and that is just the start of my list of nagging annoyances. All of this bothered me, but none of it would have mattered if the rest of the game was stellar. It's not. Symphony of War is a marriage between Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle with unexplored hints of Advanced Wars. On paper, this premise seems incredible and it immediately sparked my imagination. But the more I played Symphony of War, the more I felt like the developers never took the opportunity to be critical of Fire Emblem and Ogre Battle. By the end of my time with SoW, I felt like it was a game that was blindly copying some of the worst elements of these two franchises rather than improving or innovating on them. The most egregious problem I have with Symphony of War is that the barebones basics of the squad-based mechanic never worked for me and it only got more muddled as various unnecessary complexities were layered ontop of it. Ultimately, if you're not impressed by what Fire Emblem games do as tactical RPGs, SoW isn't going to change your mind. SoW plays on an even flatter 2D map than Fire Emblem. It's beholden to player/enemy phases rather than a turn clock for each individual squad. Maps are big and mostly empty with enemies that don't move unless you come within their range, so there are several empty turns where you're moving towards the objective or setting up against the next group of enemy squads. Most enemy units are fragile and die within one or two attacks but can also decimate one of your units if you're not careful, which further exacerbates all the problems with the rest of the Fire Emblem mechanics. Outside of the auto-battler mechanic, SoW eschews everything that makes Ogre Battle unique or interesting. And I would argue that the Ogre Battler auto-battler mechanic makes the Fire Emblem formula worse. For better or worse, Fire Emblem is a game where you are constantly playing on a knife's edge of minute calculations. How many enemy attacks can I survive? Can I hedge my bets that I'll avoid the statistically average amount of attacks? Am I willing to risk getting hit by an enemy crit? But the squads and auto-battles in SoW muddy these calculations significantly. You can't predict what is going to happen during a single attack, let alone predict a whole phase of defending against the enemy. I prefer tactical games to be played based on intuation rather than the calculation heavy approach Fire Emblem takes. But it feels like SoW's design emphasizes the calculation-driven approach while also blindfolding you from making those necessary calculations. The balance is all over the place in SoW, too. You're supposed to be making meaningful choices about the composition of your squads to try and counteract the enemy, but your choices are oftentimes hollow or outright meaningless. The auto-battler just isn't great. Because all of your units attack at the same time, I constantly watched as pikemen who could one shot a unit of cavalry ganged up on a single guy, or saw a sorceress waste her one attack doing 12 damage to a priestess with high magic resist, or lamenting having group of rogues attack an enemy squad's backline and split their attacks so evenly that they kill nothing. And honestly? I don't think the developers could even fix this if they wanted to - it would make the auto-battler feel even more swingy and in favor of the attackers if your squads had precise targets. By the end of the game, these issues are exacerbated by the fact that you're fielding big squads with 8-9 units each. There's so much that is out of your control in SoW. Encounters oftentimes feel outright pointless because everything does so much damage or is so random that it doesn't matter what tactical nuances you're taking into account. To make the reliance on blind chance worse, all of the items and recruits available at shops every chapter are completely randomized and inconsistent. There are also weather effects that change your battle prowess and character affinities that affect growths and supports and a morale system and artifacts that you can equip to squads and a tech tree and resources and limited special powers on the tactical map and all sorts of other things I'm probably forgetting. But none of this ever felt like it actually mattered. By the end of the game, the Ogre Battle mechanics transformed from neat and novel to unpredictable and irrelevant. There were even times where I stepped away for a refill during enemy phase because the stakes were that low. I wasn't thrilled about the scenario or map design, either. In just about every map, SoW sends a lot of expendible junk units at you to whittle at your insanity and HP pools. The entire game is played in a consistent cycle: Approach a group of enemy squads at the very edge of their reach. Let them get a couple of attacks against you on enemy phase. Decimate them on player phase. Heal up and proceed to the next group. And SoW bogs this down with things like bonus objectives that rely on keeping suicidal AI alive or out-of-the-way resource nodes that are required to upgrade your units or largely underwhelming treasure chests. Finally, I wasn't happy with the difficulty. Normal was never challenging and felt like a testament to why Fire Emblem games need perma-death to remain tactically interesting; SoW demonstrates that you can constantly throw away your units and 100% clear the maps with scarcely any effort otherwise. Hard adds the aforementioned permadeath mechanic, but it feels hastily tacked on to please a niche audience and transforms SoW into a slow, plodding experience that revolves around praying the auto-battler is kind to you and ensuring all of your units are revived before you complete the final objective of the map. This is a game that needs its mechanics rethought in order to introduce difficulty; adding a 50% bonus to enemy damage isn't going to suddenly make it a strategic masterpiece, it's just going to make the swinginess of the damage more problematic and progression even slower. Symphony of War is a game all about executing alpha strikes to decimate enemies so they can do minimal damage to you and then setting up for a safe enemy phase. People that are enthusiastic about a familiar gameplay loop like this are probably going to love Symphony of War. But for people like me that are tired of Fire Emblem's grip over the market and frustrated by its homogeneous gameplay across decades of titles, Symphony of War feels like an unwieldy experimental clone. SoW is a game with a severe identity crisis; it doesn't know if it wants to be a tactical game where you have to fight tooth and nail to achieve victory with squads that take attrition losses over time or if it's a careful calculation simulator with permadeath that resembles Fire Emblem. In trying to be both (and neither), it provides a disappointing experience that lacks strategic stakes and feels bloated by unnecessary content. There are moments where I thought Symphony of War really came into its own. The best parts of the game are when the objectives push you to move out your forces while discouraging turtling or when the attrition mechanics actually feel meaningful. I desperately wanted to love Symphony of War, but in the end, I can't even bring myself to recommend it with all its many flaws and inconsistencies.Show moreShow less
23 hours at review52 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
This game is incredible start to finish. I felt like a child playing through FE: Sacred Stones for the first time. I will be picking up any DLC and sequels without question.Show moreShow less
45.2 hours at review193 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Symphony bills itself as a tactics game, and harps on the importance of utilizing tactics in battle, but the mechanics don't lend themselves to that end. For example, cavalry are unimpeded by hills or terrain such as woods, meaning that they can simply charge through what should be movement impediments and attack your ambush troops with ease. That's inane - cavalry should be punished severely for fighting in unsuitable terrain. Heavy armor units should also be at a severe disadvantage when fighting in unsuitable terrain against light units. Also, if a unit is capable of performing ambush attacks, why can't it hide in the appropriate terrain? Why is the damn thing still visible? Some ambush. There is little to no information, save what is provided in text blocks during tutorials or the game's encyclopedia, about the properties of all terrain tiles. Even the entries there are woefully incomplete and inadequate. What constitutes 'rough terrain'? Anything but grasslands? Is a wheat field rough terrain? What are the properties of swamps? Do forests grant added protection against arrows (they should)? Do hills do something besides provide 1 more range unit to ranged attacks (they should, such as increased defense)? This means it's first and foremost an RPG - NOT a tactical game - where stats are more significant than any sort of tactical capability. Speaking of the woefully inadequate game encyclopedia, it is missing explanations for a slew of status effects or further information for properly triggering charge and ambush attacks - sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. There's no explanation as to why - according to the cavalry unit description if I move maximum range (or 6 tiles) before attacking an enemy I should get a charge attack. It also contains just blatantly incorrect information. For example, it states that siege cannon take up two tiles when they simply don't. Then there are the mission objectives and extra objectives. Mission objectives need to be met in order to finish a map. Some of them are simply stupid - for example, the swamp monastery map. The objective is to get your protagonist's unit to a particular tile to end the mission. However, I had completely destroyed all enemy units, including reinforcements. I still had to waste several turns moving the protagonist unit to the specific tile in order to end the mission. The extra objectives grant you extra faction experience if completed. They include things such as ensuring that allied units survive. However, the allied AI (and enemy AI, for that matter) are utterly brain-dead. For example, allied cavalry units consistently charged to their deaths against enemy units filled with pikemen and crossbowmen. One of the side objectives was to ensure no more than 2 of these cavalry units died. Of course I failed the objective due to their insanely suicidal and cavalier (heh) attitude toward life. Failing that objective was not on me - it was on the developers for coding cavalry units to blindly charge to their deaths against units specifically designed to destroy them. What sort of idiot commanders did the allies hire? There's nothing inherently wrong with any of this, and the game is fun to play in order to level up different troop types and see how they function. My issue is - don't claim that tactics are relevant when you don't even take basic terrain factors into consideration, the AI is brain-dead and suicidal, and you give the player super units who can unga-bunga their way through an enemy force by simply being present. Edit: 6/13/2022 (Note that today's patch may have addressed some of the issues above) Other problems include certain tactics not working correctly. Zone of Control has no effect, as enemy units can still move full speed past my units. Magic is apparently less effective when used 'consecutively', so I'm assuming that means if a healer uses a healing spell twice in a row it is less effective. Is that if used on a single unit, or just twice in general? Is that per caster, or for your army overall over the course of a turn? The morale system is silly. You can kill a squad's leader, utterly destroy the squad except for two archers or two casters (who will get wrecked without any covering units), and they still might have a low to nil chance of surrendering, regardless of the size or composition of the unit attempting the surrender. Two unarmored casters out in the open getting attacked by a full squad of heavily armored knights? Nope, no surrender, their morale is still 'fair'. C'mon, that's just stupid. Edit 2.0: Chapter 12 is stupidly long and boring, and consists of you watching an overwhelming amount of enemy units move around. I guess the benefit is you can try to take as many out as possible to farm XP for your units. Honestly, they should've ended the chapter so I didn't have to waste an hour of my life watching the enemy army shuffle about, waiting for them to kill me. Escort mission. This map is pure RNG - if you can luckily one shot whole squads as they ram themselves to death against you, great! Otherwise, quickload. No one likes escort missions, especially when the AI is brain-dead and is only set to run to an objective, not avoid enemy units. It's like babysitting a lemming and trying to ensure it doesn't run off a cliff every five seconds. Enemy super units. You spend quite a few chapters avoiding, or running from, enemy super units that can one shot an entire squad. The devs fall back on this mechanic far too often. Boring and trite design. Valkyries. They're an utterly useless Tier 3, suffering from a massive identity crisis. They lack the healing power of a Tier 2 mounted healer (despite the game specifically saying they have the healing capability of a hospitaller, lol) and the attack power of a knight, making them pointless and a waste of a slot. You'll keep your mounted healers at Tier 2 if you want them to be effective. The class needs a mechanics re-work to be useful. Flying units can't fly over walls in certain maps that they can fly over in other maps (lol why? You're artificially limiting my "tactical" options). They also can't move or stop on certain tiles with no rhyme or reason - for example, where mountains meet plains. They also move more slowly than cavalry. What's the point then? Stun is useless when ambushing - it applies to the missed attack due to the ambush, not the attack the enemy actually gets to take. What is this game's obsession with water units? Water unit recruits, water units in my starting squads, water units in recruited squads... water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink. Terrible map design - move a turn, bait minimal enemy units with heavy to soak, punish with light / ambush troops, repeat ad nauseam. Some maps are designed with enemy light ambush / stealth attack units already situated in rough terrain. There is nothing you can do to avoid this - you have to bait and soak the damage with heavy units. These maps typically have Donari temples past the rough terrain with enemy ambush units, as if the devs knew they set up the map to screw you. If you don't recruit as many units as possible early on you'll get severely hosed later in the game. Late-game recruits, including uniques, have horrid stat spreads that don't match their level, regardless of affinity. You'll see level 40 units with 30s and 40s in their primary class stats, making them worthless. I can see now with getting deeper into the game the devs spent too much time trying to craft a narrative instead of focusing on game design. The narrative they did craft is rife with spelling errors, at that. What a disappointment - if I want a good story I'll read a book or join in on a TTRPG, not play a video game. I'm here for the tactical combat, not what your OC Donut Steel Amazonian mommy fetish paladin feels about Donar. I have no more room to express my dissatisfaction with this game. It's BAD.Show moreShow less
2.9 hours at review46 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.