20 Best PS4 Strategy Games

The Banner Saga 2 is the second part of a trilogy, and it picks up the Viking caravan story right where the first game stops. Several heroes from the original return as playable characters, and many of the choices made in the first game have a direct impact in the second. If someone died back there, they stay dead. The fights are still turn-based, and the road between them is still a string of hard choices.

Fans liked it enough to fund the ending. The crowdfunding campaign for the third game raised $416,986 against a $200,000 goal, and The Banner Saga 3 came out in July 2018. Play the first one before this; it will hurt more that way.

Tactics Ogre started on the Super Famicom, where it sold 500,000 units in Japan, and Reborn is the latest version of it. Yasumi Matsuno directed and wrote it. The characters are by Akihiko Yoshida, and the music is by Hitoshi Sakimoto and Masaharu Iwata. If that team sounds familiar, it is because Matsuno went on to Square and made Final Fantasy Tactics with many of the same people.

The battles use a chess-inspired combat system, and the story was inspired by conflicts in Europe and Asia. It is a war story about three ethnic groups splitting a country after its ruler dies, and it does not go easy on anyone. Think of it as the older, angrier sibling of the game at number 3.

Frostpunk comes from 11 Bit Studios, the Polish studio behind This War of Mine, and it has the same habit of making you feel terrible about your choices. The whole world has frozen. You build the last city on Earth with steam-powered technology, and heat means life. The team was inspired by Jacek Dukaj's novel Ice, by early polar explorers and by survivors of the Andes flight disaster, which tells you the mood.

It is not a sandbox city builder, and the developers said so themselves. The campaign has three acts and ends with a huge storm. Along the way you pass regulations that keep people alive at a cost, and you balance hope against discontent. Let either one slip and you lose. It is the coldest game on the PS4, so keep a blanket nearby.

British studio Introversion Software made Prison Architect, and the name tells you the job. You design and run a prison. Prisoners come in at different security levels. The higher ones bring more difficult reputations and more severe crimes, but they also pay extra, so greed is part of the game. Death Row prisoners can even pass an appeal and walk out.

Psych Ward was followed by 10 more DLCs, and Paradox Interactive bought the rights in 2019. The Sunset update in May 2023 ended active development, and a sequel, Prison Architect 2, was announced. Players who like building games name it in the same breath as Tropico and Cities: Skylines. It is a management game with a dark sense of humour about what a prison is for.

Natural Doctrine was meant to be a PlayStation 4 launch game. It was delayed twice and came out in April 2014 instead, which made it one of the first strategy games the console had. It is also the first game Kadokawa developed entirely on its own, and the director was Atsushi Ii, who had directed Patapon before.

It is a strategy RPG set in the mines and ruins around the fortress city of Feste. You play Geoff, a guard soldier sent to clear out goblin dens so humans can reach the resources they need. That is about as fancy as the setup gets. The appeal is the fights underground, and the fact that it was there when PS4 owners had almost nothing else like it.

Valkyria Chronicles first came out on the PlayStation 3, and this remaster reached the West on May 17, 2016. It is set in Europa, a made-up region loosely based on Europe in the early years of World War II. Sega's CANVAS engine makes the whole thing look like pencil drawings in motion, and it still looks lovely.

You lead Welkin and Squad 7 of the Gallian militia, along with his adopted sister Isara and a prototype tank called the Edelweiss. The fights work like rock, paper, scissors. Foot soldiers handle anti-tank troops, anti-tank troops destroy tanks, and tanks flatten infantry. It has been cited as one of the greatest video games of all time, and the sequel is on this list too.

Grand Kingdom came out in Japan in 2015 and reached the West in 2016 through NIS America. The director, Tomohiko Deguchi, used to work at Vanillaware, and you can tell. The game shares its design ideas and its look with Grand Knights History. Masaharu Iwata, who also scored Final Fantasy Tactics, is on the music team.

You run a squad of mercenaries on a continent where four nations have fought since an empire fell a hundred years ago. Knights no longer fight these battles. Mercenaries do, and they work for whoever pays. You sign with a nation, buy its gear and take its quests. The online war between nations was the big hook, but the Western servers shut down by 2019. The single-player campaign still works fine.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 is a strategy game in the style of the first three, and the team made the remaster at number 15 partly to get players ready for it. The idea was to let people try the series' gameplay on a modern platform before the new one arrived. For this game, the developers studied records of World War II troops and used them as reference.

The big new toy is the Grenadier, a soldier class that fires mortar rounds. There is a ship, too. Your squad's ship, the Centurion, takes heavy damage and limps along on its backup engine, and an amnesiac girl named Angie turns up in the engine room. If you liked the first game and wanted more of it on PS4, this is that, with a few new tricks.

Children of Zodiarcs is a story-driven tactical RPG from Cardboard Utopia, published through Square Enix Collective. Its makers said it came from a deep love of Final Fantasy Tactics and the 16-bit Shining Force games, plus a love of board games and card games like Magic: The Gathering. You can see all of that on the screen.

The twist is that your attacks come from collectible cards, and you roll craftable dice to see how well they land. So the dice are gear. You build them, then you build a deck, then you take both into battle. It is one of the smaller games on this list, and its fans tend to be people who already love tactics games and want a new one.

Shadow Tactics is a stealth game played in real time, inspired by Commandos and Desperados. It came to PS4 in July 2017. The setting is feudal Japan just after the shogun has unified the country, and a mysterious warlord called Kage-sama is threatening to start the wars again. You control a small team, and each member has their own skills.

Mugen is the only one who can beat an enemy samurai in a straight fight, so most of the time you avoid fights. Everyone gets a single heal and a matchlock pistol with very little ammo. Players keep putting it in their lists of favourite PS4 games, often right next to much bigger names. If it hooks you, Commandos 2 is two spots higher.

Invisible, Inc. is a turn-based tactics game inspired by X-COM, with the focus on stealth and espionage. Corporate soldiers have wrecked your spy agency, and only its leader, two agents, Monst3r and an AI called Incognita escape. Incognita cannot survive outside a powerful computer for more than 72 hours, so you have three days to get ready for one final mission.

Each run is a race against that clock. You direct agents on covert missions and grab what resources you can before the end. It came to PS4 in April 2016, and the PC version scored 82 on Metacritic. It is the kind of game you lose and start again the same evening.

Commandos 2 is the sequel to Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines from 1998, and Kalypso Media remastered it in 2020 with updated graphics and controls. It is the real-time tactics game that inspired Shadow Tactics, two spots lower. You control a squad of commandos sneaking behind enemy lines in World War II, against Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan.

The missions go all over the place. You blow up a bridge as a train full of Japanese army commanders crosses it, and you sneak onto the aircraft carrier Shinano. The remaster got mixed reviews, mostly for poor controls and an underwhelming up-res. Nazi symbolism was also removed from it. Playing it with a gamepad takes patience. The level design is still the reason people come back.

Civilization VI came out on PC in October 2016 and reached PS4 in November 2019. It is a 4X game, which stands for eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. You pick a civilization and take it from ancient times to the near future, building cities and researching technology. You also trade and argue with other world leaders, or march your army over.

The tech tree takes its cue from the land around you, and culture has a tree of its own. It won Best Strategy Game at The Game Awards 2016. Ask what strategy games to play on PS4 and players reach for this one along with Stellaris and Frostpunk. Be warned that the one more turn feeling is real here, and it usually hits at 2am.

Tropico 5 is a dictator sim. You run the island nation called Tropico, and the game knows exactly how silly that is. It reached PS4 in April 2015, and it was the first Tropico with co-op and competitive multiplayer for up to four players. The campaign starts with Tropico declaring independence from the Crown, a spin on the British Empire, and then your dynasty rules on into the 21st century.

You can also write a full constitution, which is a lot of power for one small island. Polygon found the satirical tone childish, and the game was banned in Thailand by the National Council for Peace and Order. Neither stopped it from being one of the friendliest ways into strategy on the console.

Stellaris is a space strategy game that came out on PC in May 2016. Paradox ported it to consoles, and it reached PS4 as Stellaris: Console Edition on February 26, 2019. It plays in real time in a galaxy that is procedurally generated, so no two maps are the same. You lead one civilisation that can travel faster than light, and you claim systems and colonise planets along a web of routes called hyperlanes.

The crises are where it gets wild. They can include a crusade by a marauder empire or an invasion by nanomachines from another galaxy. The updates were named after famous science fiction writers, Stanisław Lem among them. One player said they "accidentally did a 13 hour session" with a friend, which is about right for this one.

This War of Mine came from 11 Bit Studios, the Polish studio that later made Frostpunk, and it is a war game where you never play a soldier. You look after a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city, short on food and medicine, with snipers outside. During the day the snipers keep you in your shelter, so you craft and trade and keep the place running. At night you go out to scavenge.

There are twelve playable characters, and The Little Ones DLC adds a child who cannot defend themselves or help at first. It has sold over 9 million units. It became the first video game added to recommended readings in school, and Poland's government hands out the PC version for free. It is the saddest game on this list by a distance.

Stoic Studio was founded by three former BioWare designers, and The Banner Saga reached PS4 in 2016. It started out as a medieval fantasy, but they moved it to a Viking-inspired setting to avoid what they saw as the "overdone 'elves, dwarves and orcs' dynamic". The art is hand-drawn animation inspired by Eyvind Earle and Don Bluth, and Austin Wintory's music is played by the Dallas Wind Symphony.

You lead a caravan across a world inspired by Norse mythology, while a warlike race called the Dredge that despises humans closes in. The battles are turn-based and inspired by Final Fantasy Tactics and Shining Force. Between them, your choices decide what happens next. Players recommend the whole series rather than one game, and they are right to.

Final Fantasy Tactics first came out on the PlayStation in 1997 in Japan and in January 1998 in North America. The Ivalice Chronicles is an expanded remaster, released on September 30, 2025, which makes it the newest game on this list. Yasumi Matsuno directed and wrote it, with Hironobu Sakaguchi producing.

You play Ramza in the Lion War, and the story slowly turns toward the Glabados Church, which has been controlling Ivalice and engineering the war. The church brands Ramza a heretic and sends the Knights Templar after him. You recruit generic soldiers and build them with the Job system from the main Final Fantasy games. The PlayStation version had sold over 2.4 million copies by 2011, and it has become a cult classic.

Darkest Dungeon is a gothic roguelike about the psychological stresses of adventuring, and it means that part. It came out on PC in January 2016 after a year in early access and reached PS4 later that year. You recruit a team of flawed heroes, send them into the dark and watch them crack. Stress works like a second health bar. Let it build up and your heroes get frightened, or start acting against your orders.

The battles are turn-based, and position matters, since enemies can pull characters out of rank. That idea came from The Bard's Tale. Lovecraft partly inspired it, and the narrator's grim voice sets the mood. It sold over two million copies and got a sequel in May 2023.

XCOM 2 is Firaxis's sequel to the 2012 reboot XCOM: Enemy Unknown, and it takes place 20 years later. The twist is that it follows the bad ending of the first game. The aliens won, and XCOM now flies around in the Avenger, an alien ship turned into a mobile base. It came out on PC in February 2016 and on PS4 that September.

Half the game is turn-based combat, where your squad hides behind cover and enemies try to flank anyone left exposed. The other half is running the Avenger. New concealment rules let you set up ambushes, and timed objectives keep you from playing it safe. Maps are procedurally generated, so missions stay fresh. The War of the Chosen expansion came in 2017, and players keep bringing up the expansion when they talk about it. Players recommend it more than any other PS4 strategy game.