This War of Mine

This game has carved a path for the next generation of survival games to venture down. As consumers, we hate making hard moral decisions but we love the freedom it gives us – to screw up because we screwed up, not because that was the way the game goes. When one of my protagonists dies it’s utterly devastating, sometimes to the point of which I’ll restart the game before it has a chance to save… but don’t tell anyone that. We’re bored of predictable, two-dimensial experiences and we’re bored of cheats that make “serious” games too easy. Every now and again we like losing because then when we w...

This War of Mine is one of the most emotionally investing games I’ve played in years, and it doesn’t need a complex set of gameplay systems to be what it is… a great game, and a deep piece of art on the horrors of war. A depiction of things so cruel and of life so horrible that you couldn’t imagine these things actually happening, even if you know they do.

A rewarding experience that will test your moral system, and brings a whole new narrative of war for people to listen to.

Overall, This War of Mine is an exciting game that will offer a few hours of strong gameplay before it begins to feel repetitive. The lack of a deeper story and mobile-style design make the game feel like it could have been so much more than it was. The decisions that you make and the situations that you are put in provide a pretty eye-opening experience, but the effect wears off. This War of Mine might not be one of the best games of the century, but is definitely one of the strongest games to ever be released on a mobile platform.

Whether This War of Mine truly succeeds in saying anything more than 'war is hell' I don't know. Equally, I'm not at all sure it needs to. We play a lot of wars, and it is surely only fair to sometimes be reminded that war is not really about a muscle-bound American man saving the day. It makes its point very well, in that it is harrowing, it is careful, and its increasingly deadly Groundhog day approach supports rather than disrupts the atmosphere of extreme strife. It's without doubt effective and impressive at what it does. Whether, though, you wish to subject yourself to despair in the nam...

Where Spec Ops: The Line made me question being The Good Guy, this game made me question just how far off the reservation I was willing to go to preserve life.

This War of Mine delivers a setting that is depressing and unsettling. It's a slow-paced resource management strategy game that will hang over you long after you walk away from it. Admittedly, it tip-toes into being melodramatic at times, and the controls could benefit from some hotkeys to back up the point-and-click interface. But the mechanics and setting are so well done, it's an absolute must play for anyone looking for an example of how all the different parts of a game can come together to create an affecting and immersive experience for a player.

If you set This War of Mine’s theme aside, you'd have a tough and demanding survival and resource-management game – but it never lets you forget that it's about a serious and sad subject. It's full of thorny problems, and that just makes your small gains all the sweeter. As things begin to go wrong, the choices get harder. Do you intervene when you see a soldier assaulting a woman in a ruined supermarket, or do you keep your head down? Do you shoot a medicine you can’t afford? These questions don't have right answers. But posing them, and putting the moral issues in sharp relief alongside the ...

No summary available

The Little Ones might not expand the initial remit of This War of Mine in any real sort of groundbreaking fashion but it does meaningfully and cleverly build upon the moral and emotional scenarios that the base game does so well. A recommended expansion for fans of the original.

This War of Mine places the player in an unfamiliar role in the war game, controlling a small team of survivors in a war-ravaged cityscape. You don’t assume the role of a fearless commando in first-person, or manage troops in a real-time strategy setting; the goal here is simply survival at any cost in a broken down house. The experience is surreal, sitting at your comfortable PC and watching as your team struggles to eat, rest, stay healthy, and stave off crippling depression in a world without morals.

I recently wrote a preview for This War of Mine in which I referred to it as an Empathy Simulator. Like Cart Life and Papers Please, these games aren’t meant to be “won” in the traditional sense. Their goal is rather to give you an experience and make you understand just for a moment what it must feel like to be in a tough spot. With This War of Mine having recently being released in full, I dove back in to see the full experience.