Note: My reviews for the "Strategic Mind" games will all appear similar. This is because this series of games are all exactly the same engine, with some minor reskins and different levels. Because the games are all functionally identical, my reviews will be, too. There's only so many ways to warn gamers about the same defects, and we must question the value it has for gamers when developers copy + paste the same games over and over again onto Steam.

"Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty" is a somewhat poorly made turn based tactical game set (loosely) in some version of WW2. The game has you moving units like bombers, infantry, tanks etc around a hex based map to achieve various objectives while your enemy tries to stop you. Okay. It's been done before, a lot, and a lot better than this.

While there's one glaring technical issue, the key problem here is just the game design. The missions and factions aren't respresented properly. The game is badly balanced and the scenarios don't make sense and don't play well. The visuals are very deceptive here and the rest of the game doesn't match.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While the graphics look okay, the developer weirdly decided to lock the number of resolution options you can get... now, if you have a modern GPU, you'll probably get a bunch of superresolution options (to render the game at a higher resolution than your monitor... brute forcing AA if you like), and these are the only options that appear, because the developer decided there's no need for you to scroll through the resolutions available to you. The upshot? You can't set the game to your monitor native resolution. Now, if you're gaming on a CRT, that's fine... but come on, everyone uses a fixed resolution LCD or OLED monitor nowadays. That kind of screwup from the developer isn't acceptable.

There's also no UI scaling, so if you are forced into a superresolution, you can't scale the text back up. Not cool.

This game features a number of suspicious, likely fake positive reviews. The reviews all appear at almost exactly the same time, very shortly after the game launched on Steam, all have a direct Steam purchase of the game, and all have very similar wording and writing style, in Russian and English. Immediately after this huge peak of reviews, reviews (and player counts) for the game dropped incredibly sharply. This is highly unusual given the very low quality of the game and poor player counts. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt.This might have been done to deceive/mislead gamers into paying for a bad product. The "Positive" review score on this game should be taken with a large grain of salt.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

"Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty" has the utterly unrealistic price of $30 (that's right, AAA priced, THIRTY DOLLARS), for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. This is not a triple-A game! Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, and the questionable ethical nature of the developer and/or their associates (as outlined above), this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $30 asking price for this game could get you games like "Doom Eternal", "Final Fantasy XIV Online" or "Dishonored 2"... or pretty much any AAA game if you're willing to wait for a sale. That's just insulting pricing. Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.