Hearts of Iron IV
Worth it · Strategy · 2016
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
Worth it at $49.99.
- Length
- 51.8h
- Value
- $0.97/hr
- Reviews
- 90% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 2 GB of storage. Runs on Windows, macOS, Linux.
Victory is at your fingertips! Your ability to lead your nation is your supreme weapon, the strategy game Hearts of Iron IV lets you take command of any nation in World War II; the most engaging conflict in world history.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
The lowest price on record is $9.99, set in May 2020. It has been discounted 81 times in the 10 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 6 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 15 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 6 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 99 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 95 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Victoria II ($19.99, scores 87) beats it on value, while it beats Hearts of Iron III ($9.99, scores 48).
Steam's global achievement data says under 1 percent of players ever finish it. On a 51.8-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 10 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written July 2026 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 70 percent of the 5,321 reviews written there were positive, against 90 percent overall, and those are 2 percent of everything written about it.
51.8 hours to finish it, 1158 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 22 times the campaign.
It came out 10 years ago and 32.1K were still playing it at the last check.
The drop-off
20% start to <1% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 51.8-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
32.1K players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
the most complicated video game ever made. it will infuriate you at times, but you will look up and you have been playing for 12hr straight.
Love this game, but still dont know how the navy works. This game makes me believe that talking to girls is actually easier than managing the navy to invade Britain and the US, but it will successfully turn all players into racists.
Played this game got 15 low supply notifications broke my monitor and played the game again 10/10
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Hearts of Iron IV scores 82/100 on the BANG Score (worth it). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/394360/hearts-of-iron-ivThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 11, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.