I have been interested in This War of Mine since the first teaser trailer came out back in March. While I understood the basic concept behind This War of Mine, I didn’t expect the gameplay to be the way it is, and I definitely didn’t expect it to dig into my emotions as hard as it has. This War of Mine is a crazy, emotional trip that’ll leave you thinking about it hours after every playthrough.
This War of Mine is set, somewhat obviously in a foreign country during a modern civil war, a classic rebels versus the government scenario. The gameplay revolves around a day-night cycle. During the day you work on your base and helping support your survivors by feeding them and providing medicine, while the night sequences revolve around going between different locations and searching for more food, medicine, weapons, crafting parts, and anything else you can find. In the earlier days everything is fairly simple and easy, but the farther you get in, the tougher things get as there are less resources to go around. Food and medicine can be especially hard to find, and as more survivors join your group, they will provide you with an extra pair of hands at the expense of an extra mouth that could become nearly impossible to feed.
The art style is amazing and fits the style and the mood of the game very well. The artists went shading-crazy on everything and it gives the characters and backdrops a bleak and depressing feel. Sad music quietly plays in the background, adding even more to the emotion of the game. The visuals and audio combined give a very gloomy feel as soon as you start the game, and as resources become scarce and survivors become ill, you start to really feel the hopelessness that this game is really all about.
The art style really stands out, and sets the tone for the rest of the game.
As mentioned before, crafting materials can be found and used to help build on and improve your base. Many different items can be built and all have some benefits of some sort. Going from a big empty house to a thriving base full of life and entertainment is a rewarding journey. Survivors will lounge in chairs, read books, listen to news on the radio, and it can give you a pretty big sense of accomplishment seeing your survivors become more safe and comfortable.
Morality plays a big part in your actions, as well as the mental state of your survivors. There will be times when you’re forced to choose between your survivors possibly starving to death, or stealing from another group and potentially leaving them to suffer. Survivors act as they would in real-life and will constantly be affected by the positive or negative choices you make. Stealing and killing makes a big impact on your survivors’ mental health, and seeing or doing too many horrible things can push them into depression. Negative in-game consequences aside, it’s a really tough call when you need to screw over another group to keep yours living. Morality doesn’t just impact the characters in this game; it’ll dig into your emotions too.
Scavenging a house with other survivors in it can be the most terrifying thing you’ll ever experience.
This War of Mine does a really good job of capturing realism without overdoing it. A bullet wound or a deep cut from combat could be very fatal even after the fight is over. Constant care and bandages to monitor the wound is necessary, and even then, some wounds can be too much to deal with, causing a survivor to slowly die. Sickness and wounds are pretty much the worse things that can happen to your group, especially if you don’t have the right items to help them. Deaths in the group can also cause fellow survivors to become depressed, and they will require help from the others to try and make it through. Sometimes the sadness can even become too much, and survivors will not listen to others and end up taking their own lives, but luckily it takes quite a bit to end up there. There’s a lot of little things to monitor in this game, and all of it adds to the immersion of actually being in this war.
Struggling survivors require help from a friend to help overcome their emotions.
Weapons can be found or crafted, and are pretty crucial to your ability to not get completely stomped in every fight you get into. Combat itself feels a little clunky and unbalanced. Sometimes I would be fighting an enemy with the same weapon as me, but only their hits would land, while my survivor would just stand there and take the hits despite my constant attempt to try and stab them. Unfortunately it feels like this happens quite often in the melee combat and it can be rather unreliable and risky. Guns work a lot better but it can take an odd amount of bullets to kill enemies sometimes, which is a quick way to burn through ammo (which there isn’t an abundance of anyway.)
Combat issues aside, This War of Mine is a fantastic game. Gameplay is challenging and can be frustrating but manages to keep your roped in with an interesting world. This War of Mine offers us an outlook on war games that we previously hadn’t even witnessed, and will leave you pondering the state of the civilians next time you blast your way through neighbourhood a military FPS.
