Now Playing: This War of Mine

In games about war, we’re used to playing as a soldier. In This War of Mine, however, you don’t play as a soldier, but as a civilian, struggling to survive within a war zone. It’s an interesting concept, but I was wary of This War of Mine. Though I found its subject matter intriguing, what I’d seen of its gameplay appeared rather lacklustre. But watching a game and playing a game can provide two very different experiences. So, despite my reservations, I decided to pick it up in the recent Steam sale.

There’s no tutorial to ease you into things. You’re expected to learn on the go, although honestly, everything is fairly self explanatory. You begin with a small group of survivors in your ‘home’ shelter. Each survivor is unique in terms of appearance, skills (scavenging, cooking or bartering) and particular quirks (a preference for coffee or cigarettes, or prone to depression). You control everything with the mouse, clicking to move or interact, and you can switch between the different survivors at will.

The game is split into two phases – Day and Night. During the day, you’ll be at your shelter, issuing commands to your group, having them eat, rest, cook or craft as appropriate. You’ll receive the odd visit from a trader, or perhaps a fellow survivor who wishes to join you or needs help. During the night, you’ll assign your survivors to a certain role – to sleep, to guard your shelter, or to scavenge.

In order to improve your shelter (and therefore your chances of survival) you’ll need materials. Materials come in various categories such as building materials like wood for patching up holes in walls, or herbs you can craft into medicine or cigarettes. You’ll scavenge for these materials during the night phase at various locations which unlock as you progress.

It’s a simple, but solid structure of gather and build, and there’s a certain satisfaction in slowly watching your shelter expand, upgrading crafting stations and positioning new furniture. It’s not the most complex system, but it allows for a small, personal touch to be applied, which is very important in terms of player investment. Because if there’s one thing that This War of Mine struggles to achieve, it’s personal investment on the part of the player.

Upon starting the game, many elements of the world will be randomised. This includes your starting survivors, scavenge locations, local inhabitants, weather and materials. It gives the game a degree of replayability, but it’s sadly not as extensive as you might hope. There’s only a small number of survivors and locations, and ultimately, every game plays out the same regardless of which are available. There’s also a very limited number of unique events or encounters, and you’ll see the majority of these across a single playthrough.

As I mentioned, there’s no tutorial as such, but everything is fairly self-explanatory. If your shelter is cold, you build a heater to warm it up. You build a cooker to, uh, cook food. You build a garden to grow vegetables. If a character is hungry, you feed them. If they’re sick, you give them medication. If they’re tired, you send them to bed. It’s like The Sims, but everyone leads bleak, depressing lives. Actually, it’s exactly like The Sims, except nobody ever needs to use the toilet, which is a little weird.

Purely from the standpoint of its gameplay mechanics, This War of Mine is a rather monotonous affair. The majority of the time you’ll simply be staring at little yellow circles as your survivors craft items or search through trash. Player interactivity is minimal resulting in a very passive ‘playing’ experience. You simply don’t feel involved in the action. And this results in the problem of player investment. Because as much as I was hoping otherwise, I struggled to engage with This War of Mine.

Your ‘unique’ survivors lack any personality aside from the odd quirk, so it’s hard to really care about them as ‘people’. There’s barely any interaction between them – they just tend to stand staring silently at one another until you issue orders. And whilst the game attempts to place the player into moral quandaries – do you steal food from fellow, peaceful survivors? – there’s no real consequences or impact from doing so, aside from making certain characters feel a bit ‘sad’.

I should feel bad about beating a homeless guy to death with a crowbar and stealing his canned food, but This War of Mine fails to elicit any kind of emotional reaction. The real problem, for me, is that this vicious act is handled by the same minimal interactivity of ‘click to move’ and ‘click to murder’. It’s a disconnected experience resulting in an emotionless experience.

This basic gameplay system is also terrible in terms of ‘stealth’ and ‘combat’. Combat is extremely fiddly, as you click to attack, only to watch two characters awkwardly try to slap one another. Thankfully, combat isn’t really necessary or a focus of the experience. Most of the time, you’ll just be searching through piles of junk and loading up supplies to bring home, which you’ll then use to improve your shelter and feed/heal your survivors. And that’s about it really, and yes, it’s as repetitive as it sounds. The ultimate goal is to keep your survivors alive until the (randomised) cease fire.

But with such simplistic gameplay, and a failure to engage the player on an emotive level, it’s hard to recommend This War of Mine. I do, however, think there’s a lot of untapped potential here. There are events such as the shelter raids, but it’s something you never actually see. It happens ‘off screen’ during the night phase and you’re only informed of what happened, what was stolen or who was injured at the start of the next day.
 

This off screen action also applies to helping fellow survivors (such as fending off a bandit raid or retrieving supply drops). It’s a shame these potentially more exciting moments are things you don’t actually get to play. There’s also no real learning/difficulty curve to the game. You can build nearly everything you need to survive within a matter of days, and upgrading these tools is simply a matter of gathering the required resources.

But because there’s a strict limit in how many materials you can carry, (and because many upgrades have pointlessly high material costs) you’ll often return to your shelter a few short of what you need. But this doesn’t make the game any more challenging as it does tedious.

There isn’t really any ‘story’ as such to This War of Mine. You should really view it as a sandbox experience in which you create your own story based around these characters. And one thing I did like was the ‘custom’ game setting, which let me create my own survivor. It’s a very, very limited system, and something I’d love to see expanded in a possible sequel. Because suddenly, with my own ‘guy’ in play, I had a reason to care. I now had a personal investment in keeping him alive to the end.

With a much improved character creation system, a choice of shelters with an expanded range of custom options, more locations and an overhaul of the gameplay – perhaps allowing for direct character control/aiming – you could have something quite special. I also think there’s a lot of scope to improve the narrative aspects in terms of branching events based on decisions you make.

Overall, This War of Mine has some neat ideas, but it feels more like a framework to a better game. It fails to engage the player either through gameplay or narrative, resulting in a monotonous and emotionally hollow experience. Disappointing.

5/10