Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty Review

Strategic Mind: Spirit of Liberty is a turn-based grand strategy game developed by Starni Games and published by Hyperstrange. The game takes place during the period of World War II and focuses on the Winter War, fought between the USSR and Finland. Although a grand strategy game, it’s story-driven like the other Strategic Mind titles.

In Spirit of Liberty, you play as a Finnish general who needs to command his troops to fight back the Soviets and try to win the war. The story of the game is based on real history, containing events that actually happened, and in order to continue, you need to complete your objective. Failing means restarting the level, and the game ends with the historical ending of the war. There is also a non-historical route, but it’s still predetermined and follows a story; it’s not a sandbox feature. 

The pacing can feel a bit slow, and the missions you need to complete are seemingly random. There isn’t a lot of logic to the main quests, and most of them are just recapturing certain cities or destroying Soviet equipment. For a game that’s based on real history, Spirit of Liberty fails to properly explain the events surrounding the war and the European geopolitics of the time, with Finnish characters calling the USSR “Our age-old enemy” — something that is blatantly wrong historically. The dialogues are mostly fine but have some problems, being cringe-worthy at times.

Spirit of Liberty’s gameplay isn’t very different from the rest of the Strategic Mind entries, except for the divisions that are used. The world is a tile-based grid, and everything you do depends on the tiles. Your units can only move a certain amount of tiles, and you can only attack enemy divisions that are close enough to yours. Different units have different strengths and weaknesses: some move faster and others slower, some have better defence and others better attack, and there are even differences in optimal fighting range. As with all strategy games, tanks are your main way to power through the enemy divisions, being fast and hard to destroy, although if the enemy has any anti-tank artillery and you didn’t plan on that before starting your offensive, you’re most likely fucked. The air force isn’t a very important factor if you’re playing on anything but the hardest difficulty, rendering it almost useless if not for air reconnaissance.

Division designing is mostly boring, not giving you a lot of freedom and instead providing you with possible upgrades to your units. These are already predetermined by the game and don’t let you create your own ideas for your own preferred way of playing. Spirit of Liberty’s enemy AI is also pretty “stupid", making almost random moves sometimes and just attacking the closest thing to its divisions at any given moment, not thinking about the importance of each tile and how units interact with each other. It uses the sheer amount of divisions it has instead of actual strategy to try and beat you, and although that’s the historically accurate way the USSR fought in the Winter War, it really changes it from the usual expectations of strategy games and can make it a lot less enjoyable for fans of the usual strategy gameplay.

When it comes to graphics, the game has its ups and downs. When moving your divisions, you can get some beautiful 3D-modelled scenes of your units moving through the different tiles, but the tiled world looks awful from the “god” perspective you play from most of the time. And while beautiful, having an animated scene almost every time you move your units is mostly annoying after the first few times it happens; even though you can skip it by pressing the left mouse button, it can still feel like a huge waste of time.

Spirit of Liberty has a sound design that can be considered good but isn’t anything to be impressed by. It has SFX for almost every unit and every action it can make, which is great for immersion and makes the game feel a lot better. The music isn’t what I’ll call good, but that is just my personal opinion — it still fits the game very well, being European war music. The worst part of the sound was easily the voice acting which doesn’t convey any emotions and makes it feel like the characters don’t care about what’s happening in the slightest. 

All in all, the game isn’t anything to be excited about but isn’t awful either. The way the AI works is different, but I wouldn’t say it’s lacking, just unique. The game tries to be as historically accurate as it can but doesn’t really manage to do that well, making the pacing feel bad at times and being very hard to understand for people who don’t know a lot about the Winter War. Putting the voice acting aside, the rest of the game is mostly good and can be very enjoyable for the right audience.

Overall, the game has more positives than negatives, although isn’t very appealing to most players or even to most grand-strategy players. It can definitely be considered good, but it won’t really captivate anyone except for a very niche audience.