This Little War Of Mine – Review

This Little War of Mine places you in the midst of a fictional war, in charge of three survivors with the aim of the game to basically keep these survivors alive for the duration, and to do this you have to scavenge a war torn city by night, and craft items by day.

There comes a time, when you think, why was a game even made. What drove a group of people to labour over something for general consumption? This Little War of Mine is one such game.

Each game randomizes the players you control at the beginning and the time of year and other factors, so i can only comment on my experience.  Its obvious though, that with character names such as Pavel, Bruno, Roman, etc this is based on some eastern bloc conflict. Bosnia, Ukraine, or many other scuffles like this is how to imagine this game was set.

As a fan of side scrolling 2D games like Shadow Complex, Valiant Hearts, it was with great interest i got to sit down and play this. The graphics of this game are very good, and work very smoothly. The animations of the characters as they move are almost film like. The artwork is also fantastic and sets a powerful mood for the backdrops, by night, day, rain or snow. There is also a lot of detail in the surroundings that give an overall convincing experience.

I did have huge issue with the text on screen though, as even with superb eyesight, and a 40 inch TV, i had to get to around 3 foot away to read the writing of the in game text, some of which was extremely important.

The actual gameplay itself is extremely vague. There are no tutorials at all. Your left to figure things out as you go. I really don’t like games that lead you by the nose but with so many options in an almost RPG like environment here, some guidance would have gone a long way. For example the first night i went scavenging i half filled my backpack for just in case moments, only to find it was totally unnecessary and therefore wasted a night. It took me about 3 days to also figure out how to craft better equipment, only because i stumbled across a workbench in my own house to do so!

To survive players have to eat, sleep, keep warm, and very importantly keep their moral up, which is the difficult part. There are items scattered around the world to make beds, seats, cookers, etc, and finding food, medication, growing food are obvious life skills. Occasionally other people knock at your door and try to barter with you. ( not that i managed to as again, a tutorial was needed here ) Your home can be raided whilst you’re out raiding other places too, and anyone left at home can become injured in these raids.

As you play, if you don’t keep the players you control in tip top shape, they slowly and surely spiral down. Characters become hungry, very hungry, starving, for example, and the mental effect this has on them also then spirals down too from sad to depressed.  This also manifests itself in how they walk. At the beginning they jog everywhere, but as things get worse, they slope as slow as can be. Even the actions you do can affect players mental health that no amount of food or booze can cure, to the point of players simply don’t want to get out of bed.

The game’s morality system works in other ways too, and later in the game you will come across children and other characters as well. The thing is there seems to be little direction from the game other than to survive. There isn’t any apparent narrative or story, it’s just survive for as long as you can.

So you settle down to craft and help your players as much as you can in the day, before night sets in and one of your crew prepares to go out at night for more supplies, and so on and so on, for as long as you can manage.  

Conclusion.

If dear reader you’ve managed to get this far in the review then you may have noticed there is absolutely no enthusiasm from me for this game. The reason is this has to be THE most depressing game, of a most depressing genre ever created.

I played for and hour and a half, and in that time all i could manage to get my 3 characters to do was survive for about a week, visit about 4 locations, before 2 of them got shot, and a third just gave up on living because he was, starving, slightly wounded, very depressed, and upset about the fact his two friends were dead.  In that week i had to watch my players slowly wither away, slowly lose their will to live, slowly give up doing anything altogether.

In other survival games there is at least one iota of fun to be had, but there is NOTHING like that here. I got no pleasure or satisfaction from doing anything in this game. You can imagine the sequel to this game being something equally as joyous as “ This little prison camp of mine – Players must find ways to survive Auschwitz concentration camp for 10 months before the Allies arrive. “ My little War of mine is about as happy as that would be.  

The game isn’t gory, it’s not graphic, it’s not really too hard, it’s just utterly depressing, completely pointless and so devoid of any sort of fun, in any way shape or form that i have to question why it was even made in the first place. War stories of human horror can be made that have just as much emotional weight than this, but can also be great fun to play. Valiant Hearts for example. Survival games can also be fun too, just, this is certainly not one of them.

So when my play through ended after an hour and a half, i deleted the game instantly, had a big sigh of relief, got myself a stiff drink and played Plants V Zombies as i felt a need to cheer myself up immediately!