Welcome Back, Commander Review — 22 Days Later

Welcome Back, Commander is a real-time strategy decision-making game that tasks players with balancing looting, fighting, and survival. Clearly made with passion, the game features a roguelite gameplay loop that can quickly become addictive. However, despite its potential, design flaws and arbitrary limitations occasionally make the game feel clunky, holding it back.

Welcome Back, Commander begins by explaining that the city of Sun Stone has been placed under quarantine after a breakout of a mysterious virus (spoilers: it’s zombies). As a general posted at one of the nation’s major military airbases, your job is to assign and monitor a task force of soldiers as they enter the city for a set amount of days. Their goal? Extract as many civilians as possible and, hopefully, synthesize a cure, but mostly, survive the ordeal and escape. Fail, and the game ends if your entire squad dies.

The game splits each day of your mission (22 days on normal difficulty) into four different stages: camping through the night, a morning event, a strategic choice, and, finally, an encounter. Each of these segments involves decisions you can make, with the final encounter being an RTS mission where you control your troops.

Each event, from the night camp phase to the strategic choice, is a roguelite, procedurally generated event that gives you decisions affecting the upcoming encounter as well as your supplies. Camp decisions include healing your squad, leveling up, crafting, and eating. The morning event usually involves an increase or decrease to your squad’s resources or inventory supplies, while the strategic event offers a chance to loot different types of supplies or add a new member to your squad.

The issue with these events lies in arbitrary limitations or forced randomness that can make survival frustrating. This is especially true for the night camp phase, which dictates your chances to heal, eat, level up, or craft. What’s frustrating is that you are not only limited to one of these options but the choices are randomly selected for you. You won’t always be given the chance to level up a squad member, and despite the limitations that hunger can have on your squad members, you may not get the option to feed them. Imagine sitting on a massive food stockpile and still entering the next encounter with reduced effectiveness simply because the game didn’t give you the option to feed your troops.

The RTS encounters at the end of each day challenge you to navigate your squad through a dangerous situation, almost always following the same series of events, with twists depending on which location you choose to visit. You load into a location and must find the exit, as well as the objective preventing local survivors from leaving—or, occasionally, preventing your own escape. Along the way, you have the option to loot containers for supplies, with waves of zombies spawning periodically, increasing in intensity depending on how long you stay and factors such as noise and the threat level.

The game always gives you the chance to loot a lot of materials during these segments. The issue is that doing so puts you in danger of being overrun, with squad members dying incredibly fast when exposed to zombie attacks. The game gives you a pretty fun way of balancing your own greed for supplies with the risk of death, something that is a pretty iconic theme in the zombie apocalypse genre.

There are a lot of interactions in the game that go unexplained, which is something you will either love or hate. I personally enjoyed it, but it can lead to some frustrating moments. With how fast your squad members die, you can often lose one or two members to a mechanic that wasn’t explained, and you often won’t know what happened until after they’re dead. I found this enjoyable personally because the game has a roguelike mechanic where each failed run helps you unlock new supplies for your next run, so I didn’t mind learning things the hard way when defeat was a learning experience instead of a punishment.

Different members of your squad can interact with different parts of the map in their own way, which I found interesting. Medics can heal and rescue survivors, while engineers can build turrets and interact with environmental obstacles, like generators or barricades. However, something that absolutely boggles my mind is that these units do not have weapons; the military did not send these specialized soldiers in with any guns. That often means your team is very limited in their self-defense capabilities, and your engineers and medics will die remarkably fast if overrun, with no chance to defend themselves. The engineer can build auto-turrets, but since these are restricted to certain maps that give you the option, it’s kind of useless compared to the ability to simply hold a weapon. Even when you unlock the “secondary weapon” slot on these characters through leveling up, they don’t get to carry guns, instead just getting extra utility.

Welcome Back, Commander is a cool idea for a game. It has a very addictive formula that is easy to lose a couple of hours to, simply experimenting with mechanics you haven’t tried yet and unlocking new starting gear for a hopefully better run. However, arbitrary limitations can make some aspects of the game feel frustrating, and some buggy design features—such as huge hitboxes on your squad that make them get stuck on their movement commands—can keep the game from being quite as fun as it could have been.

Welcome Back, Commander was reviewed on the PC. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Welcome Back, Commander is available on Steam.