Victoria II
BANGER · Strategy · 2010
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $19.99.
- Length
- 25.9h
- Value
- $0.77/hr
- Reviews
- 92% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce 8800 or ATI Radeon X1900, 2 GB of storage. Windows only.
Carefully guide your nation from the era of absolute monarchies in the early 19th century, through expansion and colonization, to finally become a truly great power by the dawn of the 20th century. Victoria II is a grand strategy game played during the colonial era of the 19th century, where the player takes control of a country, guiding...
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
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was October 2014. 122 discounts in the 14 years on record. They run about 75 percent off, roughly 5 weeks apart. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 6 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Victoria 3 ($49.99, scores 28) and Imperator: Rome ($39.99, scores 18).
Critics scored it 75. Players sit 17 points higher at 92 percent, which usually means a game that plays better than it reviews.
Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 10 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2021 to August 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 66 percent of the 1,089 reviews written there were positive, against 92 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it.
Finishing takes 25.9 hours; clearing it takes 252, which is 9.7 times the campaign.
Players
490 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
My 2nd favourite Grand Strategy game before EU4. Works really well for the period it is set in, and still more enjoyable than Victoria 3, even without mods.
Absolutely terrible, horrendous, incomplete, filled with bugs, objectively one of the worst games to ever exist. But still better than Victoria 3 though.
A classic game that, while complex, you don't have to relearn every update, and all the mods today will work for the most part.
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.
No data upstream: achievement curve (Steam global achievements).
Cite this score
Embed the live badge, copy the line, or download the card.
Victoria II scores 87/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/42960/victoria-iiThe 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 Aug 3, 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.