This War of Mine

Engaging story and gameplay, with amazing writing and nowadays, more relevant than ever as a anti-war piece of art.

Exciting experience! Game is atmospheric, difficult enough and playable. You can restart scenarios many times, but after you understand basics and compele any scenario for the first time, game becomes much easier. 100% worth playing. Must have.

I own the game on Steam! This game tries to be different. It wants to be serious and leave cheap genre standards behind. It wants to confront the players with a more realistic scenario and give them a glimpse into the consequences of war. I am all for that! The problem is that the very game mechanics are extremely bland. The game kinda reminds me of time management games like "12 Labours of Hercules". Your characters are puppets and you have to look after their needs constantly. You have to constantly give orders for the most basic things and i could not find any means to schedule tasks (like you can in RimWorld). And if you fail to do so they simply sit around and don't even have interesting idle animations that would somehow enrich the setting. That's daytime. During nighttime you send scavenging parties to find stuff, there is a bit of fighting and you are constantly confronted with arbitrary limitations. Why can i only send x people to scavenge? I personally took care that everybody got rest during the day and now people are not ready to explore? Why? Not because they have something else to do in my base but because the game says so. These limitations feel so artificial and arbitrary to me that the whole setting disintegrates and i am left with a very basic management game. old rule holds true: if i want a really good story and meaningful insights i read a book.

The truth is this game is a huge time sink with little rewards coming your way. It is very very slow in it's gameplay. God forbid, you take someone out who is wounded or very tired, they will crawl through a mission and there is no way to sped it up. You literally watch your character walk at snail’s pace. Also I have no idea why you can't forward time in your house. You can either end the day, or wait. Thing is, you need sometimes need to wait until some action is completed. Catching water for example takes 5 hours but not the full day, so ideally you would wait the first 5 hours and then reapply the filter and end the day, but you can't speed this up. There are also a lot of inconsistencies too. Message says you have been raided, but they did no harm. However it also says my character is bleeding and it doesn't look good. Other times, I would have my character never go scavenge because is slightly sick so he is resting and recovering. But throughout the game he never actually recovered from being slightly sick even though he rested all the time and even took meds. On one other immersion-breaking situation character says, "We can't just sit here and die! We must get supplies even if we have to steal them" and then in in the same day, the character refused to go scavenge for supplies because they were depressed. The only redeeming thing about this game

The game gives you no tutorial whatsoever. This is fine for the basic mechanics, as they are fairly simple and learning them through experience and intuition is satisfying. Where it is not fine is in the combat. I got 4 or 5 hours in before engaging in any combat, and died immediately without any understanding of why. (I clicked the little attack button repeatedly and never attacked the enemy; even though I had a knife and he was unarmed, I ended up getting punched to death.) With the game having permadeath, this is fairly inexcusable. Everything in the game is so scarce that losing one of my three characters like this made the whole experience feel like a pointless waste of time, and I ended up quitting and uninstalling out of frustration.