US and THEM

I went into US and THEM expecting something in the vein of a leaner Twilight Struggle or a digital approximation of Cold War proxy maneuvering, and the concept is genuinely compelling on paper. You pick a side, CIA or KGB, and from January 1960 onward you try to flip nations to your ideology through covert operations rather than military force. No tanks, no infantry engagements. Just spies, assassins, economy experts, sabotage chains, bribes, arrests, and interrogations. For a strategy fan who spends weekends optimizing Paradox campaigns, that premise has real pull. The mechanical skeleton holds some interesting ideas. You manage money, oil, and technology as core resources, building spy networks across the world map and waiting for the right moment to trigger coups or revolutions. The fog-of-war layer matters here: most units are hidden from the opponent, so intelligence-gathering is a genuine priority rather than an afterthought. Special doctrine-level moves, including a Domino Theory chain reaction that can tip multiple nations at once, add a layer of strategic planning above basic unit placement. The hero roster pulls recognizable Cold War figures, Che Guevara and Fidel Castro on the communist side, J. Edgar Hoover and Henry Kissinger on the capitalist side, each carrying unique attributes that can shift regional influence. Random historical events fire throughout the campaign and demand reactive decision-making, which at its best gives the game a live-newspaper feel. The problem is that Steam's community has returned a mostly negative verdict across dozens of reviews, sitting at roughly 37% positive. That is not a rough-around-the-edges score from players who wanted a AAA budget; that is a signal that core systems are not working as intended. Common criticisms cluster around AI quality, interface friction, and a lack of feedback clarity that makes it hard to understand why your operations succeed or fail. For a game where hidden information is the whole point, opaque failure states are a design-level issue, not a cosmetic one. There is no active mod ecosystem and no visible post-launch patches addressing the AI behavior that reviewers flag most often. The game also uses AI-generated community assets, which is a minor note but worth flagging for buyers who care about production standards. For the right player, specifically someone with a deep tolerance for rough indie strategy titles and a genuine fascination with Cold War geopolitics, there are sessions buried here that will click. The two-campaign structure gives you a meaningfully different opening roster depending on which superpower you choose, and the space race and nuclear deterrence mechanics add a prestige-point dimension that keeps turns from feeling purely tactical. But the ceiling is low relative to what the genre can offer, and the floor is actively frustrating. Newcomers to Cold War strategy games would be better served by building a reference point elsewhere first before returning to this one with calibrated expectations.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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