US Conflict – Tank Battles

Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Online), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

WARNING: THIS GAME HEAVILY PUSHES MICROTRANSACTIONS

US Conflict – Tank Battles is a free-to-play Real-Time Strategy game released in 2025 on Xbox One and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2026. Set during World War II, this game has players commanding ground troops, tanks, and other ground vehicles in battles throughout the European front of the war.

The presentation has some elements in its favor, like a good variety of different historical tanks rendered in 3D, but overall the visuals here are somewhat sub-par, with environments lacking in detail and unimpressive textures. In addition, the framerates slow to an absolute slide show when the action gets really intense. These visuals are backed by a soundtrack with fitting military marches and… less fitting electric guitar rock-style themes.

The core gameplay here has some elements in its favor as well. There’s a good variety of units, and some depth to the strategy – there are radio towers to capture in maps and doing so improves your resources. When deciding which vehicles to build, you have vehicles that specialize in fighting other vehicles, those that fight against ground troops, and those that fight both, plus vehicles that perform specialized tasks like laying mines, repairing damaged vehicles, or expanding your view distance. There’s also some variety in the campaign’s tasks, ranging from taking out enemy positions, capturing the enemy base, and escorting a vehicle safely to its destination.

I really want to enjoy US Conflict, because I definitely feel like there’s a great Strategy game buried underneath here, and I did enjoy myself quite a bit while playing. I started out feeling shocked that a free-to-play game seemed so good… but the more I played, the more problems I had with it, and over time it became increasingly more difficult to ignore those problems.

The tutorial is terrible. It rushes through everything without giving you a good idea of what everything is and what it does. I had no clue how to determine which unit was best for which situation, and apart from specialized units like the mine deployment unit and the repair truck, I feel like none of these units are properly explained. I don’t even know what can and cannot capture a radio tower, let alone which units to take into battle against a particular kind of opposition.

You can have units clearly labeled to show what side they’re on or what type of unit they are, but not both, meaning either way there’s a strong possibility of running into mix-ups. You can move around and rotate the camera but cannot change its height or angle. When placing buildings in your base, there are some places you cannot place unless you rotate the camera a specific way. You’re not clearly shown what your unit limit is, as far as I can tell. You’re only told some of the conditions needed to call in an airstrike, not all. You’re shown how to get the game to remember two groups of units for later reference, but there are four slots and the game never explains how to use the other two. There doesn’t appear to be any way to quickly shift the camera to a unit under attack.

When setting a waypoint for units, units will form in a wide radius around that waypoint rather than staying neatly-packed, and maybe that’s better for avoiding area attacks like airstrikes, but it’s a huge pain when trying to get your units organized. Units travel at different speeds, and even when moving them as a group, you’ll have slower units trail far behind, meaning the only way to keep them together is to inch them manually across the map. In addition, moving multiple units at once often results in those units taking completely different routes to get to their destination.

Things get uglier when we look at the monetization. This game comes with one single-player campaign free to play, with two extra ones available for purchase, and I would argue that’s a good way to go about it. Unfortunately, the game also locks units behind a paywall, and what’s more, you can use purchaseable in-game currency to upgrade your units, a blatant pay-to-win mechanic.

This brings me to the multiplayer, and unfortunately, the online lobbies for US Conflict appear to be mostly empty. I saw a few stray players here and there, but I strongly suggest that if you’re looking at this game for multiplayer, you’re best off bringing your own friends to play with.

That’s five full paragraphs of complaining, plus earlier complaints about graphical issues. And once again, I want to stress that I really enjoyed this game. I can’t recall the last time I played a Real-Time Strategy game on Nintendo Switch that I enjoyed so much (barring non-traditional Strategy games like the Pikmin series), and it’s free! Who doesn’t like free? But with so very many problems, bugs, design flaws, and such a severe lack of polish, topped by nasty predatory game-breaking microtransactions, I cannot recommend US Conflict. To the developer I want to say, you had something potentially really good here, but it needed more time, more playtesting, and more restraint with the monetization. As-is, this is a huge disappointment.

tl;dr – US Conflict is a free-to-play Real-Time Strategy game with a healthy selection of tanks to command, and there’s a great game buried in here somewhere, but it’s buried under a mountain of problems, poor design, shortsightedness, lack of proper testing, lack of polish, and ugly microtransactions and pay-to-win elements. If this game was treated with more love and patience by its developer, and less cynicism, it could have been something excellent. Instead, it’s just another game I feel I need to warn people away from.

Grade: C

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