Game Over OnlineThis War of Mine
This War of Mine is a real-time strategy game where you control a group of civilians in a besieged city. With the city in enemy control, most of the people have fled, stores have shut down, and the utilities have been turned off, making survival a dicey proposition. This isn’t a game where you eventually build up your civilians into an elite fighting force so they can go all Red Dawn against the opposition. No, simply scavenging for supplies and keeping your civilians functional is all you need to do — but that’s difficult enough that winning the game is no sure thing.
This War of Mine doesn’t include any sort of manual or tutorial. You’re just dropped into the game without any information about what you’re supposed to be doing. Fortunately, most of your activities are straightforward. If you see a “hand” icon, that means there is something that you can use or loot. If you see a “pile” icon, that means there is debris that you need to dig through. There are also “operate” icons for using workbenches or stoves, “door” icons for opening doors, “lock” icons where you need to use a lock pick or a crowbar to open something, and more. Surprisingly, there aren’t any tooltips to explain the icons, but most of the images make them self-explanatory, and for the non-obvious ones you just have to figure them out as you play.
You begin a game of This War of Mine in your base, which looks like a bombed-out apartment complex. You start with 2-4 civilians and possibly some equipment, and you have to proceed from there. Some of your early activities include ransacking your base for usable supplies, building beds so your civilians have a comfortable place to sleep, patching the holes in the walls so it’s more difficult for people to rob you, and setting up gardens and rat traps so you can supply yourself with food.
Enemy snipers watch over the city during the day, and so that’s when you do things in your base. But at night you’re free to roam the city, and you can send one of your civilians out to scavenge for supplies. The locations you can visit start out friendly, with lots of materials — including wood, canned food, and tobacco — freely available, but eventually you have to go to places where other people are living. These other people might be friendly traders, who barter with you for supplies, or they might be unfriendly and armed militants, who attack you if they see you trying to take their stuff. Your civilians don’t like it when they have to steal or kill to gain supplies (they can become depressed about it), but you can usually get better loot that way, and so you have to strike a balance. Your civilians can also get killed during fights, giving you another reason to avoid them, especially since you only get one auto-save for your game, and that auto-save is only made at the start of the day.
The locations in This War of Mine are presented in a 2D cut-away view, sort of like you’re looking at an ant farm, except with schools and churches and apartment buildings. The primary color in the game is gray, just to reinforce the idea that the city isn’t a happy and carefree place. For the most part, the graphics aren’t anything special, but they get the job done. Lots of graphical objects (like cupboards and staircases) are re-used all over the place, but at least you can always tell what everything is supposed to be.
Similarly, the sound is fairly minimal. Every so often characters say something, but you just see the text appear above their heads. There isn’t any voice acting. There is some music in the game, but it is low-key and somber. The sound effects are basic. You could probably turn the sound off in the game and not notice the difference.
One of the nice things about This War of Mine is the randomness. There are about a dozen civilians that you can control (including a lawyer and a handyman), and you never know who you’re going to get. The locations you can visit in the city are also random, including sometimes whether they’re inhabited or not. And there are random events, such as cold spells in the city (where you have to burn a lot more fuel to keep your base warm) and attacks on your base (where failures cost you supplies and injure your civilians). As a result, two game of This War of Mine might play completely differently.
I played This War of Mine twice. In my first game I didn’t know what I was doing, and things went badly. I got two civilians killed, and the others got so depressed that they “broke” and wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning. But things went better in my second game. I had a good collection of civilians (including Boris who has the largest carrying capacity), and I got my base up and running quickly enough that robberies never really hurt me. This War of Mine is based at least in part on the Siege of Sarajevo, which lasted from 1992 to 1996, but to win the game here all you have to do is survive for about a month (the game length is another one of the random elements), and your civilians are hardy enough that they can hang on for a while even when they’re injured, sick, and / or starving. The two games took me about 20 hours to complete.
Overall, while I found This War of Mine to be an intriguing and novel game, I didn’t really enjoy it. It is downbeat and somber to a fault, especially if things start deteriorating and you have to watch your civilians get ground down into nothing. After I beat the game once, I didn’t really have a desire to play it again, even with the randomness, and even after I read some forums and discovered that there were things in the game that I hadn’t tried yet (like using hatchets to chop up furniture for firewood). But given the game’s modest $20 asking price, it’s certainly something you might want to consider if you’re looking for something new and different. Just don’t expect it to put you in the holiday spirit.
Reviewed By: Steven Carter
Publisher: 11 bit studios
Rating: 74%
——————————————————————————–
This review is based on a digital copy of This War of Mine for the PC provided by 11 bit studios.
