Warlord: Awaji

Darkmatter Games' second immersive strategy game hands you a samurai army and one order from the Emperor: take the island of Awaji. You give orders from inside the warlord's body, not a top-down map, and when the line breaks you draw your own blade. Out now on Steam, September 9, 2026.

The pitch, in one minute

The studio calls the genre immersive strategy, and the first game, Warlord: Britannia, built the idea: complex campaign strategy, but the camera never leaves your character's eyes. In Awaji you recruit and promote samurai, each with a name and their own experience, arrange them into formations with a drag-and-drop menu, then march out and take villages, forts and shrines across a 14th-century Japanese island.

The wrinkle that keeps showing up in early reactions: when a fight goes badly, you don't watch it fall apart. You are in it. One Steam reviewer described the effect on day one — a treeline stops being a tactical overlay and becomes something you genuinely can't see through, because you're the one standing next to it. Recon turns into a walk you actually take.

Two systems make the map more than a checklist. Shrines you capture shift spiritual aura between clans, which is an unusual war resource. And esoteric warrior monks can curse enemies and coordinate coalition attacks — the closest thing the game has to diplomacy.

The day-one Steam score, honestly

Within hours of unlock the game sat at 7 reviews, 5 positive and 2 negative. Read the negatives before you buy, because they're specific: one player couldn't get the campaign to boot at all, a French-language review says movement keys can't be rebound and announces a refund request, and a Chinese-language review reports crashes mid-play. The tutorial has soft-locked people too — one player skipped it entirely after hitting the freeze a third time.

This is a tiny studio's second game, and the first hours of any launch are the buggy ones. Darkmatter has pinned an issue-collection thread on the community hub and is clearly reading. If you'd rather wait, the launch discount doesn't vanish overnight and a demo lands October 14.

Your first night on the island

Five things worth knowing before you wander off from the beach:

1. Do the tutorial in order, exactly. The devs pinned ordering advice for a reason — steps done out of sequence are how people got stuck.
2. Camp needs three specific items: a sleeping roll, a resting mat and a food tray. Several day-one players built the obvious stuff and still couldn't finish the tutorial because one of these was missing.
3. Set a perimeter before dark. Screens, fences and guards. You can pack the whole camp up and relocate later, so nothing here is permanent.
4. Promotion raises your army cap. Conquered land lets you promote leaders and carry more warriors — but the promote control is easy to miss, and plenty of players hunted for it on day one.
5. Shrines are strategy, not scenery. Take one and the spiritual aura shifts your way while the rival clan's drops.

The long version, with the stuck-points other players hit, is in our first-night camp checklist.

PC only, and it wants RAM

Steam lists Windows only, no controller support, and no cloud version yet — a GeForce Now request thread is already live on the hub. Minimum specs are unusually chunky for a small studio: Windows 10 64-bit, an Intel i5 9th gen, 16 GB RAM and a GTX 2060, with 32 GB and an RTX 3070 recommended. Six gigabytes of disk space.

Accessibility is a bright spot: adjustable text size, color alternatives, adjustable difficulty, playable without timed inputs, and save-anytime. Fourteen languages ship at launch, including Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

Buy now or wait a patch?

Buy now if you liked Warlord: Britannia (1,939 Steam reviews, Very Positive, so the house knows how to ship this genre) or if the first-person-command idea alone sells you — Mount & Blade people keep showing up in the reviews. Wait if you need key rebinding on day one or a clean boot: the current complaints are technical, the 10% discount should still be there next week, and the October 14 demo is the zero-risk test.

Watch: Warlord: Awaji Main Trailer (official Darkmatter Games channel)

For the other scale of strategy on the site, the ENDLESS Legend 2 page covers the 1.0 launch and the 50% discount running to October 1.