This War of Mine

This War of Mine

Title: This War of Mine

Developer: 11 bit studios

Platform: PC, Mac, Linux

Genre: Strategy

Price: 19.99

Available on Steam and if you buy from their website you get a Steam key and a DRM-Free version

            This War of Mine is a Real Time Strategy game in which you control a group of survivors who are trapped in a besieged city. During the day you simultaneously control all your survivors in the safe house and have them perform tasks such as crafting, trading, eating, sleeping, and building. You get a random set of survivors with special skills, for instance, I got a football player with higher sprint speed, a reporter with bargaining skills, and a celebrity chef with no empathy for his fellow man.

            At night you start by assigning tasks to your survivors like guard duty and sleeping. One survivor can be sent out to scavenge. Scavenging is where the more active gameplay comes in.

"Action Packed"

            When you scavenge you mostly click on piles of garbage and cupboards hoping for food or needed parts but occasionally there are others around that are not happy with you scavenging there. To deal with this you can either: sneak around and avoid conflict or alternatively you can engage them in combat. The sneaking is very tense since if your survivor dies they are permanently dead and you can’t just load an old save. The enemies are also fairly smart, they notice if a door is left open and they can hear you if you're being noisy. You have just enough information and tools to avoid getting caught if you are smart. The combat is fairly clunky but as long as you take advantage of stealth during the engagement it's adequate.

            The game is based on the Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. A problem with games based on real life struggles is they often make it impossible to do well or kill off people at random but that isn’t a problem in this game. It is possible to comfortably complete the game if you are good. They clearly put making a solid, playable game above sending a message and if you manage to miss the moral of the story it’s conveniently written on a wall outside the safe house.

Ohhhhhhhh... Now I get it

            The whole game has this interesting charcoal drawing aesthetic to it. It’s very unique and doesn’t get in the way of being able to tell what’s going on,  it really adds to the dark atmosphere. It’s kind of subtle but if you prefer your games to look as much like the “Take on Me” music video as possible there is a setting to turn the sketch effect way up which mostly seems to lower the frame rate on the effect.

            Overall the game is really good the first time you play it. The scavenging locations are all unique and interesting the first couple times you visit them. Eventually they stop introducing new scavenging locations and the ones you already visited get boring and then they run out of resources worth gathering. Then you’re stuck in the safe house trading with the travelling merchant to get food and not even leaving at night. This stage of the game is not very interesting and consists of waiting and hoping that the merchant brings food. It gets that a bit stale in the first play through towards the end and the second one is much worse. The second time you play you know all the tricks, the struggle of barely surviving isn’t there anymore, and the locations remain unchanged so you know where to find everything. It’s a good game the first time you play it, after that you’ve already seen everything worth seeing. It’s good - just don’t expect much replay value. I’m excited for the inevitable sequel.