If you’re looking for iconic videogame visuals, it’s hard to top the classic pixel art look! After decades of tech upgrades, the humble pixel is still one of the most popular—and most beautiful—aesthetics in strategy games.
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From the early days of Windows MS-DOS in the 80s and 90s up until the present, pixel art can be found in genres from strategy to JRPGs and beyond.
Unlike other visuals, good pixel art retains its charm year after year. So, let’s celebrate some modern gems and their strategic predecessors for their blend of beauty and gameplay!
10 Songs Of Conquest
Gorgeous Modern Masterwork
Songs Of Conquest
- Released
- May 10, 2022
- Developer
- Lavapotion
- Publisher(s)
- Coffee Stain Publishing
- Engine
- Unity
- ESRB
- m
- OpenCritic Rating
- Strong
For sheer aesthetics alone, I’ve seen few modern strategy games as beautiful as Songs of Conquest. While this game is a clear love-letter to the enduring classic Heroes Of Might And Magic 3, it’s the best type of homage—one which dares rival its inspiration.
Playing as one of four factions, Songs of Conquest performs a medley of campaigns, challenge maps, and multiplayer options in its strategic setlist.
Add a native map editor atop that, and you’ve got a winner for both modern audiences and pixel nostalgics (like myself).
9 Death Crown
Punish Mortal Arrogance
Platforms | PC, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Xbox One |
|---|---|
Released | August 23, 2019 |
Developer | SWORD Team |
ESRB | Teen |
Steam Reviews | Very Positive |
Sure, we’re all familiar with the classic look of 8-bit or 16-bit pixel visuals. But how often does a modern game show up using entirely 1-bit visuals?
Death Crown is an indie RTS that proves that the mighty pixel doesn’t need any fancy-pants multicolor nonsense to still look beautiful. Its animations evoke an 80s line art style while remaining easy to understand while trying to destroy humanity for its arrogance.
Oh, did I fail to mention that you’re playing as Death? The game’s campaign pits you against an upstart humanity whose king seeks immortality, a plot that is well-supported by the stark visuals of the 1bit style.
8 Tooth And Tail
Redwall: Mad Max Edition
Anthropomorphic animals are usually cute and cuddly, like in Brian Jacques’s Redwall books or the recent Bloomburrow expansion for Magic: the Gathering. That doesn’t mean there’s no dark side to animal stories!
Tooth and Tail is a fast-paced RTS built around short, action-packed battles. Whether playing through the macabre humor of the story campaigns or battling buddies in multiplayer, it’s a great game for pixel enthusiasts wanting a strategic quick-fix.
Personally, I’m a big fan because Tooth and Tail is an RTS that supports split-screen multiplayer—a rarity nowadays! Maybe it’s just me, but I’m still fond of gathering in the same room on game nights.
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7 Advance Wars
Assemble Your Armies!
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin
- Released
- January 21, 2008
- Publisher(s)
- Nintendo
- Multiplayer
- Local Multiplayer
- ESRB
- Everyone 10+ // Language, Mild Violence
- How Long To Beat
- 21 hours
- Prequel(s)
- Advance Wars: Dual Strike
- Number of Players
- 1-4
When it comes to icons of the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS eras, Advance Wars jumps into mind due to its extensive map builder and hotseat multiplayer.
Building upon Japan-exclusive predecessors, Advance Wars is a pixelated turn-based strategy game with a simple objective: conquer the opponent’s HQ!
Of course, no strategy game is ever THAT straightforward. Advance Wars is an excellent tactical game due to the variety of units available, resulting in engaging rock-paper-scissors fights between diverse land, air, and sea units. However, only the game’s weakest units—infantry—can capture an enemy building!
While there was a modern remake of the first two Advance Wars games in 2023, alas, they’ve opted for more modern 3D-based visuals.
The pixel-based nostalgia may be gone in the Nintendo Switch edition, but the plot and strategic puzzles of Advance Wars continue to hold up.
6 Dungeon Of The ENDLESS
Tower Defense Dungeoneering
In Dungeon of the ENDLESS you’re launched off into deep space on a prison colony ship, only for the vessel’s catastrophic crash to bury you at the bottom of a labyrinthine dungeon.
Despite the spacefaring beginning, this strategic roguelike is as dungeon-centric as anything in the fantasy genre.
Beautiful pixel graphics, however, aren’t the only reason to delve into this dungeon. Dungeon of the Endless puts a unique twist on the roguelike dungeon-crawl by focusing on tower defense gameplay to expand your territory and defend your spaceship’s generator .
This tactical twist helps Dungeon of the ENDLESS stand out from the crowd of indie roguelikes and earns it a spot on our list.
5 Tactics Ogre
Tactical Titan
A monolith of tactical gameplay, the legacy of 1995’s Tactics Ogre goes more than pixel-deep. This game’s isometric map added a new strategic dimension—quite literally, introducing height to grid-based battles.
Combine that with a time-sensitive world map and an engaging, branching story, and Tactics Ogre truly stands out as a strategic success.
Perhaps better-known than the original, however, are Tactics Ogre ‘s spiritual successors in the Final Fantasy Tactics series. Developed by many of the same designers—and using the same iconic isometric perspective—these games’ success with an international audience demonstrates why Tactics Ogre is one of the best grid-based JRPGs to date.
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4 Into The Breach
Pixelated Pacific Rim
Ever want to enter the Drift and defend humanity against those alien kaiju in Pacific Rim? Kit out your mechs and head Into the Breach in this splendid mech-based strategy game.
Tidily presented in pixelated “game boards,” Into the Breach features deceptively simple battles with engaging mech design and strategic complexity lurking beneath.
Honestly, my favorite aspect might be simply that you’re disincentivized to blow up civilian buildings! After all, they’re the ones you’re trying to protect. I always felt a bit bad when some poor guy’s car gets tossed at a supervillain, or a building gets dropped on Godzilla.
Into the Breach gives a nod to the mech genre’s “bottom line” in a way that also makes the gameplay more challenging and satisfying.
3 Age Of Wonders
Well-Aged Strategies
Age of Wonders
- Released
- November 11, 1999
Age of Wonders is a strategic gem from the sunset of the 90s which, alone, provides plentiful evidence of how well good pixel art endures.
The game’s maps and characters remain attractive today, with colorful and well-characterized portraits to boot.
Yet you can’t get this high on the list on visuals alone, and Age of Wonders also endures due to the depth of its gameplay. Both the overworld and direct battles are turn-based on a hex grid, and require a variety of air, sea, and subterranean units to navigate them successfully.
Further, RPG elements allow for deep customization of an army’s heroes to explore a variety of skill and spell combinations.
With a whopping 12 factions and options to recruit units from other factions, the game’s variety will keep aspiring masterminds scheming and scheming.
2 Fire Emblem
The Blazing Survivor
Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade
- Released
- November 3, 2003
- Multiplayer
- Local Multiplayer
- Engine
- Unity
- ESRB
- Everyone // Violence
- How Long To Beat
- 26.5 Hours
- Sequel(s)
- Fire Emblem: The Binding Blade
- Nintendo Switch Release Date
- June 23, 2023
- Number of Players
- 1-4
- How Long To Beat (Completionist Runs)
- 46 Hours
- Local Co-Op Support
- Yes (via Link Arena)
For me, the instant you say “pixel art strategy games,” I think of Fire Emblem. In a list characterized by indie icons and old legends, the Fire Emblem franchise sticks out as the series that never died (even if, alas, it has abandoned the pixel designs of yesteryear).
The Fire Emblem games may not have the beauty of Age of Wonders or the RPG customization of Tactics Ogre. Where they stand out—especially the “classic” titles—is in their compelling plots and tactical complexity.
Few strategy games have the challenge of old-school Fire Emblem because no single solution solves every scenario. Balancing your army’s strengths and weaknesses from the early levels is often necessary to avoid eventually losing units to permadeath.
What always drew my love, though, was Fire Emblem’s melodramatic stories of loyalty and betrayal. With the games’ often-grueling difficulty, the narrative really felt like you’d just gone through a battle, too.
1 Heroes Of Might And Magic
Icon Of Fantasy Strategy
Heroes of Might and Magic 3
- Franchise
- Heroes of Might and Magic
- Released
- March 3, 1999
- Developer(s)
- New World Computing, Loki Software, Dotemu
- Developer
- New World Computing, Loki Software, DotEmu
- Publisher(s)
- The 3DO Company, Ubisoft, Loki Software
- Publisher
- The 3DO Company, Loki Software, Ubisoft
- Multiplayer
- Local Multiplayer
- ESRB
- E For Everyone // Violence
- How Long To Beat
- 57 Hours
There was no way the legendary Heroes of Might and Magic wasn’t going to make it onto this list—and indeed, it deserves its place at number one! Few strategy games are so beloved or beautiful—in any art style—as the best this series has to offer.
The Heroes series blends elements of strategy, RPG, and exploration together into an iconic gaming experience. Further, it’s the first game to combine themes in this way, creating a formula which has echoed ever since throughout the genre.
Despite beginning as a strategy spin-off of the Might and Magic franchise, the Heroes series fully stands out by its own merits.
Arguably, it’s survived the test of time even more successfully than its progenitor! With several H eroes games continuing to maintain fan engagement decades after release, this series has definitively earned its place at the top of our list.
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