Solium Infernum review – the best new strategy game in years

Every strategy game - or RTS, city builder, 4X, or management game - eventually destabilizes and malforms into an idle repetition of clicks. In the early game, your decisions feel crucial, tactile - with meager resources and a small, incipient society under your precarious control, diplomacy, the economy, the military, production, and culture and research must all be carefully steered. Civilization 6, Age of Empires, and Cities Skylines 2, for example, are their most interesting during this initial phase. But by the midgame and certainly towards the final third, you have created - due to these games’ focus on exponential, colonial growth - so many units, cities, construction projects, and frontlines that you detach from the intellectual or emotional possibilities of the strategy experience. You’ve disengaged from the intricacies or forensics of leadership. Your ‘strategy’ has blurred and bloated into an abstract, gamified generality - you don’t care about your cities or your people any more, only producing more soldiers, more research, more money, or whatever resource will most expeditiously achieve a victory condition.