This War of Mine: Complete Edition

Genre: Survival Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

This War of Mine is a Survival Adventure-style game (somewhat like Don’t Starve), where you play as a group of civilians trying to survive in a war zone. During the day, you’ll be trying to maintain your energy, crafting tools and supplies, and responding to visitors as they come to your home, and at night, you will be raiding nearby areas for food and resources.

One of the interesting things that this game does is to pit your survival against your conscience, dangling in front of you good opportunities to gather much-needed supplies in some locations, but warning you that doing so will be stealing from others like you who are just trying to scrape by. Conversely, whenever someone comes to your house looking for help, you must weigh doing the right thing against your own survival. What’s more, it’s not only your own personal feelings about these issues that will challenge you, it’s also the personalities of your small band of house-mates. Perhaps one will resent giving food away to another in need, while another will be outraged if you don’t.

I really like the premise of this game, but the gameplay makes it hard to enjoy at times. Crafting or digging through rubble can take some considerable time to do, and you the player are often forced to just wait through this. The amount of supplies you can carry are extremely limited, and you’re only allowed one supply run per night, regardless of how desperately you need those supplies. Sometimes one of your people will take ill seemingly at random, and it’s unclear how to fix this – even a combination of medicine, rest, and food didn’t do the trick, and the game isn’t exactly forthcoming about why this is or what you need to do.

I completely get that the reality of living in a war zone is harsh, but there gets to be a point where reality in a videogame ceases to be entertaining. And losing supplies to a random raid at night, even with you leaving a part of your entourage on guard duty, is really frustrating not just from a “war is hell” standpoint, but from a gameplay standpoint as well. When this game works, it’s gripping and entertaining, mixing gripping ethical quandaries with scavenging, but these moments are broken up by tedium and frustration.

For presentation, the game uses 3D visuals overlaid with a “sketchy” filter, giving everything a grungy, slightly surreal look. It works well enough, but it’s not going to impress anyone.

As for the release on the Nintendo Switch, this version is the Complete Edition, which includes all previously-released content for the game, as well as promising to give players access to all content released in the future.

In the end, I have to say that I like the idea of This War of Mine much better than the game itself. Trying to scavenge supplies while making hard choices in a war zone sounds like a wonderfully unique and compelling situation, but rather than being tense and nerve-wracking, what this game made me feel more often than not is frustration.

tl;dr – This War of Mine is a Survival Adventure that has you guiding a group of civilians trying to survive in the rubble of a war zone. It does a good job balancing ethical dilemmas with the survival elements, but unfortunately the game has too many moments of tedium and frustration to make it truly deliver on the potential of its great premise.

Grade: C+

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