Crush Your Enemies!

Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local / Online)

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Review:

Crush Your Enemies! is a simple Real-Time Strategy game released on mobile devices and PC in 2016 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2018. This game has players commanding a barbarian warband as they rampage across the countryside, claim territory as their own, and above all else, crush their… well, you get the idea.

The presentation in this game is wonderful, featuring a combination of nicely animated pixel art visuals, delightfully cartoonish and well-made hand-drawn character portraits, and an energetic and cinematic soundtrack with war drums, bagpipes, vocal shouts, and an overall catchy vibe that works wonderfully for this game. Just check out the Title Screen music.

The gameplay here is pretty decent too, with players commanding groups of up to 50 barbarians at a time, and making use of opportunities in the environment to breed recruit more, train them up to be tougher in combat, and convert enemy territory to your own to make it easier for you to traverse but harder for enemies. This game isn’t an especially deep Real-Time Strategy game, but it’s enjoyable all the same.

Unfortunately, one enemy stands in your way to that enjoyment, fiercer than any soldiers or pitchfork-wielding villagers: the controls. Simply moving your cursor to your soldiers, selecting them, and drawing a path to where you want to go seems far more fiddly and difficult than it should be, and in a game where seconds count, it can be frustrating to have the path you draw for your soldiers to take inadvertently stray over enemy territory where they’ll get bogged down, or inexplicably take a detour.

Sadly, one omission really harms this element of the game: You can move the cursor using the analog stick, but not the D-Pad, which does not appear to be in use in this game. At the very least this issue is alleviated when playing the game in handheld mode, as players can opt to make use of the much more efficient touchscreen controls. However, the lack of support for the D-Pad is a pointless unforced error that will really kill the experience for a lot of players.

I suspect this frustration is much of the reason why this game’s online lobbies are abandoned. However, I suppose if you and a friend want to throw down using touchscreens, you still have that option.

Ultimately, I feel like Crush Your Enemies! had a great opportunity to be a fun but simple Real-Time Strategy game, but bungled it due to its poor controls. If you’re looking for a simple Real-Time Strategy game to play in handheld mode using the touchscreen, you may still find this game worth a look, and the presentation in particular might be enough to keep you interested. However, I think most players are likely to get discouraged quickly enough and move on to other things.

tl;dr – Crush Your Enemies! is a simple Real-Time Strategy game where players command a horde of conquering barbarians. This is a basic but satisfying take on the Real-Time Strategy genre, and one with a pretty good presentation. Unfortunately, this game’s better qualities are hard to appreciate when the gamepad controls are so terrible. At the very least, the touchscreen controls in handheld mode are pretty good, so you may find this game worth playing that way. Otherwise, skip this raiding party.

Grade: C+

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