PsychoReview: This War of Mine

This War of Mine

Why this game? :

Why did I pick this game? Hmm… Truth be told I myself don’t even know, but I do know one thing… I was sad, angry, happy and even sometimes confused while playing the game, and not from any type of bugs in fact all those feelings were gameplay related. I haven’t played a game that made me feel those emotions in a while and that alone gave me more than enough reason to review it… Truly in war, not everyone is a soldier.

Story:

This game is obviously about war, the city of Pogoren is in a depressing situation where people die every day, starve every day and steal everyday just to remain alive. From start to finish this game truly presents itself amazingly well!

Every time you start you are given three or four random characters to survive with. Each character will have its own history and reactions to what you do in the game, they even have their own distinctive personalities! Bruno is an asshole who almost doesn’t care if you kill someone, Pavle is a good person who likes to help people but won’t shy away from bad situations… Every single character feels alive and they all truly feel like they want to live! In fact every and each one of them has a reason to survive through the war, from meeting family to simply living a life of peace.

There are overall twelve playable characters!

Unfortunately even though the developers took the time to make very detailed characters with unique personalities and even made them feel like true people living through the times of war… They failed to present one major aspect of the game, the war itself.

At some point in the game you will have a radio that tells you the news, but you will never truly know how the war started, why the rebels and the army are at each other’s throats, or basically anything in terms of the history of this war.This was truly disappointing to me, I would pay just to know the lore of this amazing and well detailed world! And I hope in further updates they add it somewhere along the way.

Visuals, Design and Graphics:

The game does the war atmosphere almost too well, to a point where you will feel threatened going into new locations, the design of the world is truly beautiful! Houses are on fire, others in ruin, people taking shelter in old abandoned buildings and others simply living on the street under fire every day of their lives. You will never feel truly safe anywhere you go, no matter how much you prepare yourself, you know just from the look of the map that it’s not safe, it never is… And that’s exactly how it’s supposed to be, this is war after all!

In fact right from the main menu you will see the hatred the people have for war… Before even clicking on “Survive” you immediately see this:

See that in the bottom right corner? It says “Fuck the War!”.

The silhouette-ish art of the background and atmospheric map design make it feel like it’s more of a funeral than actual survival. From start to finish you will feel like you are in a place ruined by war and at some point you might even wonder how this place looked before all of this happened, because it feels like it used to be a beautiful city!

I’ll end this particular part with a building that’s on fire

The world aside, how do the characters look, this game works in a side-scroller fashion, which means character design and animations are important…. And the game definitely does not disappoint!

Every and each character will be almost instantly identifiable from first glance, they all wear different things and have different physique, some are taller than others, some fat, others thin… This all adds to the already amazing appeal the game puts up right from the start. Running looks natural, animations for each action look clean and nice! You will never feel like you are controlling a robot, in fact you will feel as if you’re controlling a true human being!

And one last thing… The music in the game is simply amazing, it compliments the mood perfectly!

There are close to zero graphical issues in the game, you will enjoy every second of every location you visit from start to the very end!

Gameplay and Mechanics:

With all the very well done presentation (although not perfect) and design, you would think the game would fall short on the gameplay section… And boy are you wrong!

Like I said earlier, the game gives you three or four random characters to survive with… Even though the characters are randomized, you will encounter specific characters more often than others, which makes you sometimes spam the “survive” button to get a completely new team. This will not start to annoy you until very later on in the game in fact, sometimes you will appreciate that you are getting a second chance to play with the same characters!

The game is set in periods of war, and the game blends this perfectly with its unforgiving gameplay! This is war, since when did you have second chances in war? It’s kill or be killed, survival of the fittest and all laws of the jungle apply here… The thing is, the game has this way of putting your conscience into play, you are given the choice to steal from elderly couple who present absolutely no threat to you whatsoever but if you do, you gain resources, from medicine to food and simple materials. But in turn your team will be “sad”, maybe some will even get “depressed”. And trust me, those are things you don’t want your team to be feeling!

You can be sure you will like some characters over others, and this is absolutely normal! In fact it’s what the game aims to do! You will want to keep a character safe from danger not just because he is useful but you also like him, but this works both ways as well! You will completely hate one character, but you will keep him around because he is useful… In my case I hate Bruno’s guts! But I keep him because his cooking skills help save resources.

Keep in mind some characters will feel more useful than others in the early stages of the game, physique matters when you go explore, which means you will most likely send a big guy to scavenge resources because he can carry more than a smaller character that can barely carry anything. Every single character has its use in the game, from ones having good bargaining skills (which is definitely helpful) to ones that make electronic devices (which will feel less important early in the game). Unfortunately there are like 2 characters that feel completely useless, from start to finish no matter what happens… This is of course normal, we are all but human, we can’t be always good at something that helps in situations of war, but you will find yourself just randomizing again in hope for a better set of characters.

Before I go into the exploring part of the game, I need to mention one amazing thing! You would think that all you will do in the game is go out, scavenge and go back and repeat in an attempt to stay alive… Your characters will consume food so you need more, you might want to upgrade your shelter etc… But the game throws unexpected events right at your doorstep! Once someone visited me telling me he found a military supply crate that no one knows about and asked if I was interested in taking what’s inside, in return we split it 50-50, I agreed… Two days later the military comes knocking on my door, and they ask if I know who did it and I am given 2 choices, either to rat out the person who gave me the info or lie… Ratting him out will give you extra resources from the military as a reward, lying will give you nothing, but your team will be happy! And of course if you haven’t guessed already, yes… Your team gets depressed (some won’t depending on their personality) because of what you did!

And I keep mentioning the feelings each character gets… That is because you should keep their emotions very well in check! If not, some of them might get depressed and commit suicide, and it will all be your fault and no one else’s and trust me you will feel more than just sad.. In fact you might get angry sometimes.

Yes, that is the picture you get when someone commits suicide… And it’s not pleasant to say the least.

Now about the exploration and survival part… Your characters consume food, and you will require resources to upgrade your shelter, from adding a stove, to simply making a bed, this all requires resources which you can only obtain through scavenging the game world. The game allows you to do 1 out of 3 things at night with each character, either send one character to scavenge (and you can only send one!), have the character be on patrol and guard the shelter so you can at least try to keep looters away (and yes they present a very threatening danger to your survival just like you do to the game world) and finally you can just simply have the character sleep so it can rest.

Keep in mind that characters get sick, injured and hungry… Hunger can only be ailed with food, injuries and sickness have different solutions… If the injury is very mild and as the game calls it “slightly injured” you can heal over time without the use of bandages (which are pretty rare), same with sickness, if your character is “slightly sick” you will be able to recover but he must rest for like 2 days in a row doing nothing.

The game doesn’t stop at making things difficult however, there are events and basically 2 season in the game. Lets start with events, and what better way to start it off than with the most threatening one: “Crime Outbreak”…

In this event people have truly become savages, this is where it truly fits to say “kill or be killed”… At night people will try to loot everything you have and this will happen more often than you would like… To a point where you might lose your entire team to those raids on your shelter. Raids are a very real threat in the game and you don’t want to be raided. The only way to protect yourself from them is putting someone on guard and giving them a weapon (unless you want them to fight with a freaking stick!? And no there is no stick in the game).

This game will keep you on your toes, make you experience emotions you most likely never felt in a game before and you will love it in return… From all the saddening moments to the extreme happiness you will most likely get when you finally survive the game. Oh and about that… The game will take you a good time to finish, it has no actual set time or day where the war is over, if there was it wouldn’t be called a war… The game is randomized from somewhere between 21-50 days… It will take you at least 10 hours to survive through the war for the first time and you will replay it again just to see what else the game has to offer!

But, I only have 1 complaint about the gameplay department… As enjoyable as it is, there will be very rare cases where it won’t make sense… Example: I once tried to shoot a military personal (trust me you will eventually convince yourself to do the same) but for some reason instead of shooting the guy (he is under me) I ended up going down the ladder and the character died… It made absolutely no sense whatsoever, this has happened more than once throughout my long experience with the game… But it will not happen as often as you might think, but on those rare occasions that it does you will be seriously pissed!

Final words and verdict:

There really isn’t much more I can say about this game, currently it costs basically 20 euros/dollars on steam… For that price and what the game offers I give it a:

9/10 – An AMAZING game!

• Story – 8/10 – Characters are well done and everything is nice, but you will want to know how this war happened! It just leaves you asking questions.
• Visuals, Design and Graphics – 10/10 – The game does the atmosphere perfectly! Animations are nice and clean and everything is just simply perfect
• Gameplay and Mechanics – 9/10 – The reason I am giving this a 9 and not a 10 or 9.5, is because of that last part I mentioned… It may not happen often, but when it does it will ruin all you did! The game is unforgiving so imagine yourself losing a core character in a crucial moment because of something that didn’t make sense… It literally ruined the whole game. And the fact that about 2 characters feel completely useless in the game definitely doesn’t help either.

This game ALSO receives my:

(Psycho Seal will be added here shortly, it is my absolute and 100% approval of this game, go and buy it!)

Extra:

This game has a Child of War DLC, it mainly adds cosmetic stuff in the game,  but all payments you give are sent to the War Child Charity… This has already saved hundreds of kids who are refugees of war… I encourage you to support them even more… And here (I obviously do not own this video):

 

The feeling you just had, is what you will feel in the game, maybe even more intense in some cases

Thank you for reading my review and I hope you enjoyed it… I have to go wipe my tears because Pavle died again, for the 10th time… I’ll see you guys on the next Psycho Review, that is if I don’t die in real life because of this game.