Things may be quiet on the XCOM 3 front, but we’re not short of fantastic turn-based RPGs. From the mighty Baldur’s Gate 3 to 2024’s joyous Tactical Breach Wizards, we’ve been spoiled for choice. Just out on Steam, new roguelike strategy game Astral Throne might become the PC’s answer to Fire Emblem, much as Wargroove did for Advance Wars. It offers full party customization with dozens of classes and hundreds of skills, those delicious weapon triangles, and even an intriguing narrative with multiple potential endings to discover.
Inspired by classic turn-based RPGs, Zero Sun Games’ Astral Throne whisks you into a “land beset by a falling star’s curse.” The world has been wreathed in a mysterious fog called ‘Stardust’ that muddles people’s memories, and it’s up to you to seek out the truth. Rather than being a single, long-form narrative, Astral Throne breaks its progression up into shorter roguelike runs with permadeath and a story told piecemeal through the characters you meet and the choices you make on each successive playthrough.
Each attempt offers you the ability to customize and build a new party, with more than a dozen classes that grow as you level them up. Add in hundreds of skills, weapons, and items and the loot you find will only further enhance the potential of your team. The final cherry on top are memories – when collected, these can alter the mechanics of your entire squad. Your travels will take you across a procedurally generated overworld filled with fights, towns, shops, and major boss encounters.
Astral Throne’s battle arenas have been handcrafted to ensure tight, satisfying turn-based strategy game design, but your party composition, shifting enemy loadouts, and the always-varying overworld mean that you’ll have to adapt on the fly to each fight. Even small choices early on might cause dramatic, butterfly-effect changes down the line. In true Fire Emblem style, strengths and weaknesses are defined by weapon and magic ‘triangles’ (A beats B, B beats C, C beats A), and the clean UI and robust, clear tooltips mean everything is easy to understand.
The appearance of Stardust has left this once-prosperous realm in a haze of forgetfulness. But there’s a dark plot at play here – one you’ll have to uncover over the course of many runs. The story you’ll experience adjusts depending on who you recruit to the party, with each hero bringing their own unique character traits and tales to the table. More than a hundred different story branches interweave to reach two dozen potential endings, and you’ll need to piece them together to see the full picture.
As someone who loves Fire Emblem and XCOM both, I’ve always dreamed of finally doing an ironman run with all the threats and thrills of switching permadeath on. The sheer length of those campaigns has always swayed me from committing, however. Astral Throne is different. The more compact runs make each attempt a pocket-sized playthrough, meaning that, as much as those losses hurt, I’ll never feel quite so profoundly heartbroken. There’s always next time.
Astral Throne is out now on Steam, priced at $19.99 / £16.75. A 10% launch discount available for the first week means you can expect to pay just $17.99 / £15.07 if you buy it before Friday February 14. Get it here if you’re ready to set out on a new adventure.
Alternatively, we’ve got more of the best strategy games on PC, along with the best RPGs to play in 2025, so you’ll have plenty to choose from.
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