ZEPHON on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
From the developers of Warhammer 40,000: Gladius, ZEPHON is a post-apocalyptic 4X strategy game built on Proxy’s unique tactical combat system. Guide survivors through a turbulent future, navigating unexpected disasters, eldritch horror and cyberpunk monstrosities. What will you do to survive?
ZEPHON is a strategy, turn-based and tactical game
developed and published by Proxy Studios.
Released on November 08th 2024 is available on Windows and Linux
in 8 languages: English, French, German, Korean, Russian, Polish, Simplified Chinese and Spanish - Spain.
It has received 1,132 reviews of which 992 were positive and 140 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.3 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 39.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified ZEPHON into these genres:
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Intel Core i3 / AMD Ryzen 3
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Vulkan support with 2 GB VRAM (Nvidia GeForce 10 series / AMD Radeon 400 series)
- Storage: 8 GB available space
Linux
- Processor: Intel Core i3 / AMD Ryzen 3
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Vulkan support with 2 GB VRAM (Nvidia GeForce 10 series / AMD Radeon 400 series)
- Storage: 8 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Very fun 4X game that makes every turn matter, from the research you choose to prioritize from knowing when to push and when to stay put, it is a fantastic strategy game that requires a plan but also adaptability on the player's part. I like that every faction leader plays differently as some of them can make units move after attack, rush production, or even have a big canon to defend their city. While the game has all of this going for it, some technologies like engineers are a staple since expanding your territory with multiple towns is very good for your resource pool, so it has a nice balance between picking common strategies and then incorporating your base on the map. The final war in the last few turns is exciting and makes me nervous, all players and AI pick from 3 sides and then go on an all-out war. Two sides get colossal titans, making the battlefield intense as you look to protect allies while dispatching enemies. I found high-end units to be super fun, particularly human aircraft is a blast to see the planes moving around the map at high speed, ignoring terrain and I love the skill "evasive maneuvers" that they have. One can make their army a combination of units but usually specializing pays more, I found that Humans and Cyber feel strong but Voice (the Eldritch Horrors) felt extremely weak in comparison. Hoping the new DLC Voice leader fixes this with some new units and perks. The game can get stale fast if you play by yourself, but with friends is a lot of fun and remains fresh. I had 15 hours because it is hard to get the whole gang together, but we did 3 matches, and every time it felt good, wasn't a chore or boorish, it was fun to do alliances, and wars and try to win the race of developing faster than everyone else. Graphically it looks nice, the voice acting is good and the music is nice but sometimes there are periods of silence which is a bit of a bummer. The early to mid-game is the best, you gotta analyze your starting point carefully to be successful and outpost contention is thrilling, The Late game can be a bit tedious at times, but only for a little bit at the point where you are between researching and getting the high units. Once you have the units, the late game is a blast! I recommend the game to people who like Warhammer Gladius or those wanted to try a 4X strategy game for the first time. Beginner friendly and once you get the hang of it after your first match, all that remains is optimizing moves and adapting to situations. In my group the game has been a massive hit, we always speak fondly of it and are excited to play more matches. [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/43679955/] If you enjoyed the review, please follow my curator! StarsDeck .
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10 days after the release and I have 90 hours in this game. Send help. This is a very good turn based strategy game. I'd say it's more for people that like xcom games than for people that like civillisation games. The depth and flexibility of a civ game is sacrificed in favour of combat oriented gameplay. The setting is very cool. The roleplaying missions are a nice addittion that add funcionality and flavour. The AI is in some regards very good, but in others bad. Is´t's good at focusing and eliminating units but the overal positioning of troops is not great. I love the customization options of scenarios this game comes with. I hope this game succeedes and develops further. For all my love to 40K I could not stick with gladius. The gameplay was too shallow and complete extermination as the only victory condition is just boring (although lore accurate). Zephon is for me a clear improvement over gladius in many aspects.
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So how's it different from Gladius? - It's still a very war focused game but there's diplomacy now both with other players as well as the new npc factions. Allied victory is also a possibility now. Fairly standard stuff, war, peace, alliance, trade, map exchanges. Good standing with npc factions can provide access to units you otherwise can't get. Your leader, technologies and actions affect relations. - There's 3 npc factions that compete for the map in addition to the usual human and AI players. You can fight them or build relations to unlock different benefits like trade or new units. They're connected to the game's victory conditions and overall narrative. - Modular faction system similar to newer civ games. There's a large shared tech tree with 3 distinct unit sets and different leaders with bonuses that lean into specific playstyles and add some unique techs as well. While it's technically possible to research and get everything it's not practical to do so and your leader and army will usually specialize in using one of the 3 thematic unit sets which are Human, Cyber and Voice (sci-fi "body horror" type of thing, think Dead Space monsters) though a mixed playstyle is still possible. So your factions consists of your leader, your tech/unit focus as well as any units you might obtain by allying with an npc faction. - High tier unit spam is constrained by exotic resource requirements. These materials are mostly obtained by processing more basic resources but setting it all up is pretty expensive and takes time so beelining for late game units isn't very practical as you need a strong economy as well as a bunch of other tech and infrastructure to get it all going. - There's a market now where you can buy/sell all resources and hero items with influence used as base currency. No need for heroes to visit specific spots on maps to buy items, you just buy items from the market and equip them directly onto the heroes. - More flexible economy. Like in Gladius certain terrain types are good for producing specific resources but there are technologies now that "break the rules" allowing you to compensate if you lack certain terrain. So if you lack deserts for improved energy generation you can research a tech that makes power plants more productive on arctic terrain. No rocky or volcanic terrain? Get tech for improved mineral income from cliffs etc. Ofc the new market also allows you to fill gaps in your economy. - Operations. You can build different "ops centers" where you can buy abilities to use on the map to help yourself or disrupt enemies. They can help scout, obtain resources, change terrain, debuff and kill enemies. The strongest of them are essentially low yield "strategic weapons". Gladius did have similar things but they were more sporadic and tied to specific pre-set factions. - Post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror. It's a bleak but flavorful original-ish setting. There's some Event Horizon, Dark Souls and Dead Space in there as well as a bit of Mad Max, War of the Worlds, etc. Reminds me a lot of the game called Phoenix Point by X-Com's original creator. While it's no Alpha Centauri with all its voiceovers and story, leaders in Zephon do have personalities and unique responses and attitudes during diplomatic exchanges as well as their own little narratives in the form of in-game quests. There's more potential for role playing and doing playthroughs where you seek unity and reconciliation, to cleanse the Earth of aliens, machines or both or pursue some specific vision for the world. Maybe you even swallow your pride and just try to survive even if it's in a way you didn't want to. Aside from the above Zephon is still a combat focused 4x that has a fast pace (by turn based 4x standards) while still offering a good amount of complexity and challenge as well as loads of map customization options. Hits the spot quite nicely.
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Gladius walked so ZEPHON could run. After having played the "introduction" world campaign settings, I can definitively say that Proxy Studios took everything they learned from working with the Warhammer IP and put their heart into giving us a 4X game with their own IP that comes with tons of quality of life baked in from the start. Soundtrack and art is also phenomenal, I have zero regrets picking up the supporter edition for the artbook and music. Some things I'd like to highlight that ZEPHON improves upon from Gladius in terms of the "4X hex grid civ battler": 1) Diplomacy is a real option. ZEPHON is still highly combat focused, but unlike Gladius it managed to incorporate more light diplomacy options that can keep the landscape of battle shifting and interesting beyond simply pushing forward and killing the other teams' units. You can achieve an alliance victory, but only if you manage to make everyone still alive friends with each other all around. This presents it's own challenges of not only making other players/AI/factions like you, but also fostering amity between themselves. 2) The rules compendium, keywords, and terrain have much more QoL over Gladius, IMO. Gladius pulls most of its rules for unit stats, terrain, etc. directly from Warhammer 40k tabletop concepts. Not a bad idea, but sometimes this would leave ambiguities with regard to certain interactions. The stats and keywords in ZEPHON, while not perfect, are expounded upon much better by in game tooltips and the compendium, which lends new players a better grasp on how units interact regardless of their familiarity with similar titles. 3) The base game pacing feels better than Gladius as a previous title. Most of the time I've played Gladius: Relics of War, my friend group and I typically up the game speed significantly to allow for faster and more diverse technologies as the game progress. ZEPHON retains customizable game speed, but playing the intro on the standard speed, I finished the game much quicker and more succinctly than what I could compare to Gladius. I believe this is caused in part by the diplomacy and more dynamic terrain and world events keeping the game pace fresh and motile up until the end. TL;DR there wasn't as big of a "well I won but I have to squish every single last unit to finalize things" phase that can often make the end game of strategy games less engaging. 4) The factions and research of the game are much more fluid than the rigidity of Warhammer 40k factions in a 4X civ game like this. All of the playable factions exist on a spectrum between Human, Cybernetic, and Voice (eldritch, otherworldly/supernatural creatures). While each faction leader lends themselves towards one or more of these specific categories, the research tree of the game is immensely diverse and allows you to put effort into spec-ing into other units and playstyles. At the same time, the factions of ZEPHON still retain uniqueness in having base abilities, modifiers, and unique elite traits and units that define them apart from the others. Other misc. notes I'd like to mention while I sink my teeth in: -Terrain generation is still more or less the same from Gladius, with different and more fluid terrain effects. No major gripes here, but the engine has a habit of placing all of the water tiles in a map in one large ocean at times, which causes map generation to begin to feel predictable across a large number of hours. I can't fully attest to this since I've just played an intro game on a "tiny" map preset, so I will have to continue to watch this as I keep playing. -VOICE ACTING IN THE BASE GAME. Anyone who's played Gladius checking out ZEPHON will probably remember that Gladius' units did not have any voiced dialogue. Text dialogue would appear for units as different "barks" to represent their states and actions. I imagine the lack of voicing was due to some combination of costs and licensing from Gladius using a Warhammer IP. The dialogue combining with the art and soundtrack allows ZEPHON to have, IMO, better out of the box polish than Gladius as a previous title. No need for mods to add voice acting to the game. TL;DR 10/10 would explore a resource cache of eldritch horrors to be gifted a monolithic Kronenburg flesh slab that spits larvae to shatter the enemy morale again. Helps keep my fallen soldiers sustaining themselves off of the pulsating flesh slivers of their titular hero feel a little more cozy when resisting AI assimilation and reality warping dream devourers.
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Really good 4x game with a huge focus in combat. If you played Gladius, it's basically the same system with original factions that, dare I say, are cooler than the 40k ones, including leaders that are oozing with originality and personality. To those old enough, it almst reminds me of Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri leaders. As cons, I'd prefer a bit more space to breath (this is like Gladius in that too, no turn will pass without combat) and unique units for each leader would be really cool. But even with those I really like this game and the value proposition for the price.
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Last Updates| Steam data | 13 April 2025 11:14 |
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| SteamSpy data | 14 April 2025 07:49 |
| Steam price | 14 April 2025 04:49 |
| Steam reviews | 12 April 2025 13:57 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about ZEPHON, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about ZEPHON
- SteamCharts - Analysis of ZEPHON concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck ZEPHON compatibility
Online players
60
Developer
Proxy Studios
Publisher
Proxy Studios
Release
08 Nov 2024
Platforms