If you play mobile games just for fun, then This War of Mine is not for you. It doesn’t entertain you or bring happiness. Instead, you may feel fear, constant anxiety, and frustration. But the aim of the developers of the 11-bit studio was to create an oppressive atmosphere, without which it would be impossible to understand the essence of the game.
The aim is the survival of ordinary people caught by the war in their own city. You will be able to look at the downside of any military conflict and experience the horror of battle scenes.
Thus, you will meet three characters in an abandoned, dilapidated mansion where they’re hiding from prying eyes and trying to survive. This will be a real survival your characters will have to earn every drop of water, every can of food by raking debris, breaking locks, going through the house itself and the surrounding territory. Here nothing is given just for fun and you will understand this at once, from the very first day of survival of the group.
All you may need to survive you’ll have to look for or to make yourself from the stuff at hand. Raw and canned foods won’t be enough for your characters to live long, you have to build the oven. Sleep on the concrete floor won’t recover strength, therefore you need a bed and not one. At least two characters should be sleeping when you send one to explore the area.
You have to enter other buildings, getting further and further from your refuge and these raids are extremely dangerous. This War of Mine has days and nights, and contrary to your expectations days are safer than nights.
Every day military operations are held, snipers are watching but your characters are safe in their refuge. Throughout the day you will be engaged in crafting, creating primitive furniture, manufacturing drugs, and necessary stuff for a living.
Each of your characters possesses certain skills and needs rest, food, and treatment, he can even experience different emotions. This nuance is perhaps the most amazing in the entire game. The fact is that at night you will be sending your characters to search for something valuable.
This search will provide your small team with weapons, ammunition, food, medicines, water, and a variety of other necessary stuff.
The night travel is extremely dangerous you can never be sure that the neighboring buildings arent occupied by other people. And these people are not always friendly, almost all of them are not. Therefore, collision with them is absolutely undesirable, and the best tactic for you is to escape.
If you couldn’t escape and met aggressive characters, the battle is inevitable and how it will end is unknown. Your character can die but he is able to kill someone. A murder may be negatively accepted by your colleagues they will be dismayed even if you do it out of self-defense.
As you can see, This War of Mine has many unexpected features of hopeless realism, and this is really captivating. Incredibly stylish hand-drawn graphics and atmospheric voicework will immerse you in the gameplay without any hope to quit the game. It is addictive and once you are in the game you cant go and leave your characters in trouble you will want to help them by all means.
Controls can seem complicated. You have to guess what is meant by icons on the screen.
Although they seem intuitive, you’ll need time to finally figure out how to switch from one character to another as they move from room to room, how to feed and put them to bed, open doors, and so on.
This game is a typical countdown. Days follow nights, time goes on, as usual, your home is gradually becoming more comfortable but the mission to explore the city is more complicated.
The developers claim that after a month of survival the game doesn’t end, and you have to check it yourself. This will be unforgettable, believe me.