Screenshots
Watch trailer on Steam ↗Warlord: Awaji
Darkmatter Games · Published by Darkmatter Games · Official site ↗
Content notice: Stylized blood and dismemberment. Depictions of samurai ritual suicide.
Mostly Positive — 79% positive (336 reviews)
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
Lead a samurai invasion into the mysterious island of Awaji! Recruit, promote, and upgrade your warriors while navigating the ancient world of feudal Japan. Use samurai weapons and strategies to conquer the entire island and become Warlord!
Action, Adventure, Indie, Strategy · 2026 · More free games
Recruit and upgrade warriors as you lead a samurai invasion on the island of Awaji. Navigate feudal Japan’s ancient world, using strategy to conquer and rise as Warlord.
About this game
Warlord: Awaji is the second entry in a series of immersive strategy games created by Darkmatter Games. Step into the shoes of a legendary samurai warlord, given special command and orders from the Emperor to conquer an entire island and save a regime teetering on the edge of collapse.
Immersive Strategy
A unique combination of first-person strategy elements places Warlord: Awaji in a genre of its own. Immersive strategy, pioneered by Darkmatter Games, fixes the player in the shoes of their character, while presenting them with complex strategic gameplay. Lead an army, construct your camp, conquer villages and forts, and disrupt dynamic enemy forces in a sprawling open world–entirely from this immersive strategy perspective. Turn the tide of battle by engaging directly in the action yourself, fighting alongside your own hand picked warriors fully in real time.
Dynamic Open World
The world of Warlord: Awaji is a sprawling island created using real heightmap data of its eponymous location, replete with dozens of temples and shrines from real life. Travel the roads cautiously and keep your eyes on the treelines, as civilian convoys and roaming warrior bands criss-cross the open world in real time. The local clans will react aggressively to your exploits, so choose your actions carefully. Strategically target strongpoints to weaken enemy quick-reaction forces. Capture rival clans' shrines to boost your spiritual aura and harm theirs. Work with esoteric warrior monks to curse your enemies and coordinate powerful coalition attacks.
Massive Battles
Your warriors are your most important weapon. Recruit and maintain a powerful retinue of samurai. Use conquered land to promote leaders and expand your army's capacity while organizing its battle formation in any way you like using an intuitive drag-and-drop menu. Each individual has a unique name and gains experience over time through heroic action. Give your best warriors advanced weapons and armor to boost their lethality in combat. Form diverse groups of melee, ranged, and cavalry troops. Mix and match to find the best army composition and crush the opposition.
Base Building
Construct a samurai war camp anywhere in the open world. Pitch tents and provide your troops with a variety of needs, including sleep, rest, and sustenance. Put up screens and fences to establish a perimeter. Set guards to keep watch in the dark hours of the night. At any time, you may pack up and relocate your camp, allowing for complex strategic maneuvers. Decide where and when to set up your base, and which direction to move in as you explore the vast open world.
Japanese History
All of the weapons, armor, structures, names, and gameplay elements are inspired directly from extant literary, iconographic, and archeological sources. Darkmatter Games, with the help of world leading experts on samurai warfare, has painstakingly recreated the 14th century world of medieval Japan in unrivaled detail. Historical authenticity is the core element of the Warlord franchise. Prepare to experience the visceral world of the samurai like never before seen.
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64-bit
- Processor: Intel i5
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1070
- Storage: 6 GB available space
Recommended
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 11 64-bit
- Processor: Intel i7
- Memory: 32 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA Geforce RTX 3070
- Storage: 6 GB available space
Supported Languages
*languages with full audio support
Latest news
AnnouncementsOfficial
Performance Enhancement
Warlords,We are coming up on a week since launch, can you believe it? To me it feels like it has been a month. I don't think I have worked this hard since the launch of Britannia.I was planning on diving into optimizations later, next week when I return from the wedding, but this has been bothering me. The performance of the game just hasn't made sense for a while. When testing the game it ran very smooth, but in actual builds it had stutters and seemed to be overall less performant. I was convinced for the longest time that this was due to the characters. It turns out it was something far more mundane...After a long day spent profiling and testing various optimizations I figured out the #1 public enemy: the trees! Not the trees themselves actually, they are quite fast, but rather their colliders. It turns out that the engine's built in tree collider system is extremely lacking for this kind of open world game. Disabling them and using my own bespoke tree collider proxy system ended up massively decreasing physics load on the game.This change should result in a vastly smoother running game, possible FPS gains in certain situations (can be as much as 2X), and a massive decrease in loading time (at least it has for me, so please confirm this).Along with these enhancements I have made some QOL and balance changes so please read here for that! I am heading out of town on Thursday and will be back on the 22nd!Until then,DarkmattervR106Optimized character, settlement, camp, and especially tree physics to increase stabilization and max FPS across the boardMassively decreased apparent load time (please confirm this)Changed player map icon to be an directional arrowChanged captured settlement map icons so they hide their inventory, since it can never be usedFixed downed unit icons not updating their position when fast traveling or returning to campFixed surrendered and wounded enemies being killed accidentally by player’s troops, now post-battle options are more meaningfulAd...Read full article on Community Announcements (Darkmatter)AnnouncementsOfficial
Fixes and QOL
Warlords,Thank you for an excellent first weekend! The game is performing wonderfully on Steam and the future of Warlord and Darkmatter Games has never looked better.This morning (starting at 4AM) I sat down to work on some lingering issues from the launch week. I hope this resolves a decent amount of quality of life issues people have been encountering. See here for the change list!DarkmattervR105Fixed ghost armiesFixed not being able to conquer some settlements (thank you bug reporters!)Fixed projectile errorOptimized projectiles' flight routineFixed fire arrow looping soundOptimized arrow after effectsFixed progression changes so they apply even without making a new saveFixed fast travel miles marched exploitFixed armed support so they follow closer to the front of the formationFixed “double it and give it to the next temple” trade and raze exploitAdded extra info to last tutorial stepIncreased accuracy and fire rate for all ranks slightlyIncreased allied horse health considerably to make cavalry more usefulAdded accuracy and fire rate stats to warrior menuRead full article on Community Announcements (Darkmatter)AnnouncementsOfficial
Trading Improvements
Warlords,After yesterday's patch, I still felt like something was missing from my original design intent with this game. Way too many players seemed to be ignoring the option to trade with monk factions. I finally realized that this was not because they didn't find it interesting or useful, but because they simply had no idea you could do it! Beta testers were told ahead of time that it was possible, so that raw first-time-user experience was lacking. The only way to discover trading was to get lucky and have your mouse over a temple marker on the map while it was discovered.This morning's patch is designed to bring this immersive and useful feature to light. I have included a few other improvements here as well. Like I said in the previous post, I will be continuing to monitor for any more growing pains, but honestly, I need to rest today and tomorrow, this has been a crazy week!When I return from the wedding on the 22nd, I will dig into mid/late game optimization and battle size scaling. These two items are intertwined. Want larger battles in the end regions? Performance must be locked in. So I will take care of these in tandem. Optimization in a full open-world simulation game such as this is very nuanced and risky to fix. I will take my time on this and squeeze every last drop of performance out of this engine!I am also aware that some users are having performance issues and instability that is abnormal (not just that they are trying to run the game on low specs). This seems to be partly due to NVIDIA RTX 5000 series graphics cards. I will also investigate this issue in the coming weeks and try to come up with a solution. This may be above well my paygrade and could require even more time to fix fully. Please have patience while I sort this out! I want everyone to enjoy the game.See here for the full list of changes I made last night and this morning. Have a great weekend on Awaji!DarkmattervR104Added trade with nearby settlement button to map screenAdded abilit...Read full article on Community Announcements (Darkmatter)Patch NotesOfficial
Post Launch Patch
Warlords,Thank you all for a wonderful launch week. Although it is too early to tell how the game will pan out commercially, so far I am delighted to see players thoroughly enjoying the game and embracing the new Warlord setting!As with any new release, there are always growing pains. In the past ~48 hours since launch I have kept a careful eye on reviews, forum posts, and discord issue reports. Thank you to everyone participating in this way, I appreciate the swift feedback. I take this very seriously and work hard to address issues as fast as I can. I want everyone to enjoy this game as much as possible!I had to move very quickly and make a series of patches over the past few days without a proper news article, so finally I will list them here for your convenience.September 11th, 3PM (Now) - vR103Improved starting region pacing by adding bows and naginata to checkpoints and temples, as well as a horse to the Iwaya clan mansion (northern tip of the island)Improved Hokudan region (second region) pacing by adding bows to all military settlements and horses to mansions and templesBe advised, the above changes only work on new save games because settlement inventories are mutated by convoys and trading. If the starter regions pacing was not an issue for you, please continue your save as normalFixed glowing trees issue related to DLSS and FSRSeptember 10th, 11PM - vR102Added follower counts and icons to promote buttonsAdded discovered settlement and POI types to progress panel, a couple POIs are not included as they are easter eggsChanged how the unlock panel looks so now most items will be greyed out instead of hidden completelyChanged how the camp and army inventory looks so items are greyed out instead of hidden completelySeptember 10th, 10AM - vR101sFixed softlock in tutorial where the first contact step cannot be completed if you conquer the homestead before the step startsRemoved language option from the in-game menu, somehow it returned (like Palpatine)September ...Read full article on Community Announcements (Darkmatter)Patch NotesOfficial
Patch vR102
Patch vR102 Added follower counts and icons to promote buttons Added discovered settlement and POI types to progress panel, a couple POIs are not included as they are easter eggs Changed how the unlock panel looks so now most items will be greyed out instead of hidden completely Changed how the camp and army inventory looks so items are greyed out instead of hidden completelyRead full article on Community Announcements (Darkmatter)
