This War of Mine Reviews
It's hard to recommend a game that makes you feel disgusted or upset, but I'm doing it anyway. This War of Mine is great, it just asks a lot from its players.
This War of Mine tries to give us the barest taste of what it might be like to be trapped behind the lines of a war, with our entire world crumbling all around us. If that feels uncomfortable, if it is no fun whatsoever, the developers have accomplished precisely what they intended to.
The reality of war, hammered home through stark visuals and tight resource management, in a game where just surviving another day is winning.
The goal of This War of Mine was to showcase what life is actually like for the people left behind while the battle rages on, and it provides a marvelous representation of that. The choices are difficult, it's not easy to help everyone, and sometimes you have to do awful things just to stay alive. The power of video games continues to amaze, and This War of Mine is a shining example of the endless learning possibilities games have in store.
If I'm being entirely honest, This War of Mine is one of the best all-around games I've played all year. A crisp, consistent atmosphere, intuitive gameplay, and surprising depth create a fantastic experience.
This War of Mine is possibly something many gamers *should* experience for a few hours, but would they enjoy any part of it? That’s a completely different question.
An effective lesson on the casualties of war
Whether you choose to perceive it through a moral lens or not, there's a great tactical survival mechanic driving this game beneath the didactics.
Using the interactive nature of a video game to great effect, This War of Mine brilliantly conveys this message by forcing the player to not only witness it, but to live it, experience it, and suffer through it firsthand.
This War of Mine eats away at your sanguine disposition, and yet you are compelled and determined to keep trying to survive. Each fresh start provides new characters, new locations to scavenge, and new obstacles to overcome. As bleak as the world is portrayed, 11 bit studios has a well polished title that does a masterful job of never letting you feel safe in your home and secure in your belongings. No matter how many hours you invest into bettering your situation, it's a constant struggle to survive in This War of Mine.
Regardless of its shortcomings, This War of Mine is a hugely powerful game. Your reaction to those stark visuals and battles of conscience will dictate what you take away from it, but make no mistake, this is a grim, grim experience, and I'd hesitate to state that any of its content is "enjoyable" in a traditional fashion.
A rewarding experience that will test your moral system, and brings a whole new narrative of war for people to listen to.
A recommended expansion for fans of the original.
This War of Mine is an eye-opening experience that offers a refreshing, albeit bleak take on war. It's so easy to glorify war these days that you forget about those who are really impacted by it -- This War of Mine is a much-needed reminder of that.
This War of Mine conveys some horrific truths about civilian life during warfare, and it does so in a way that only video games can accomplish.
Of course, a great deal of impressive work went into the stylised visual of This War of Mine that might not have gone into something destined for a school computer or a museum plaque. Its pencil-shaded graphics touchingly evoke political cartoons and the dreary, dark colour palate of so much war art to sap life and hope from your course of events. Generally in games, the wonderful efforts put into visuals are to add to your enjoyment, but This War of Mine is instead making use of the medium of art to help put its message across - simultaneously establishing a valid place of its own within. This War of Mine blurs the boundaries of artistic and educational exhibition and in doing so demonstrates, significantly, how effortlessly the medium of videogames can lend itself to much more than entertainment, but if you're looking for fun, you've come to the wrong place. The message here is how fragile humanity can be when the comforts of modern society disappear and a question: Do 'good' and 'bad' choices exist, or just survival of the most ruthless? It's hard to score This War of Mine as a game, because you can't win it. You can survive with enough selfish tact. You can also be more community spirited at your own expense, but then if you die will the community fail without you around anyway? This is a poignant and reflective experience, thought through with meticulous depth. The gameplay is very simple, and that's probably deliberate too - the amount of thrill you get playing it will depend on what kind of beast you are.
This War of Mine is a wonderful experience which drowns us in its realistic urban war and tells us its tragic story, one that doesn't involve happy endings.
Review in Persian | Read full review
As you begin to learn more about the systems with each passing day, it's easy not to notice real-world minutes turn into hours. I found myself restarting a campaign quite often after discovering a new strategy and my enjoyment increased each time. This is definitely one of those games that if you play late at night, you might just find yourself trading in some sleep to get through just one more day.
This War of Mine manages to convey an important message very well. By turning the player into an active participant in the cutthroat rationale of life as an ordinary person attempting to survive a warzone, it encourages a level of empathy only possible through interaction. Instead of simply hearing the stories of people who suffer unimaginable hardship as civilians during war, the audience is asked to inhabit these narratives. When our choices became their choices—as completely awful as they may be—we can better understand the ground-level tragedies taking place across the globe at this moment. 11 bit Studios' greatest success with This War of Mine, it turns out, is in creating a videogame that is profoundly unpleasant to experience.
This War of Mine is a fun, uniquely stylish and well-written game that gives players a fresh take on an old setting and asks them to try and survive.