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Friday 2 January 2015

This War of Mine

A mix between The Sims and Call of Duty. Kind of. All in all, a very interesting game and definitely one I recommend buying. 

In TWoM, you play as a group of ordinary civilians who have been caught in a warzone. Your group; while strangers in the past, must work together to survive the harsh war, hiding out from soldiers/pillagers while making sure you have enough food/water/materials to survive the long war period. Which is a pretty interesting twist on the whole simulation game. 

In mine, I started off with 3 survivors. Each survivor had a unique trait which may or may not come into play. One was a good cook, the other was a good at bargaining while the other ran really fast. Anyway, you control all 3 survivors and you start out in a ramshackle house that has broken windows and lots of debris. That is your safe house and it's where you hide out during the day while the military junta enforce a strict curfew on the streets. 

During the day, you can make all sorts of improvements to the house; PROVIDED you have the materials to do so. The house literally starts with nothing but a chair. So you'll have to build beds, heaters, make-shift ovens, workshops. Apparently all my people are extremely talented engineers. That or they worked for Ikea or are related to McGuyver. There are also some minor random events such as travelling traders, or people looking to join your group or people asking you for help. 

It's only during the night that danger kicks in. During the night, survivors have an option to a) sleep b) guard the house or c)scavenge. There can only be one person scavenging at any one time. Then you're shown a list of of locations you can scavenge as well as what kind of stuff you can expect to find there. 

While scavenging, you can also run into enemies such as soldiers or random mobs who are scavenging that area as well. Do not get wounded as being wounded is a bitch in this game. Not only do you have to rest constantly to have any chance of recovery, you'll need bandages and medicine as well otherwise the wound has a pretty high chance of getting worse. And those are in pretty short supply. You can always choose not to scavenge but it's not like your supplies are infinite and you'll definitely need to scavenge to find more food. This is probably a more interesting aspect of the game than building stuff for your safehouse. You end up having to sneak around a lot in the house you're trying to scavenge while avoiding people if possible. Red dots signifies the presence of noise where that dot is but the dots aren't necessarily always people. It can be rats or other things as well. As a very last option, you can choose to kill people but it's generally better to avoid killing random civilians as your character will get depressed and if their mood sinks too low, they WILL commit suicide. Which is bad because it leaves you short one character, which means each character has to pull 2x their weight. 

Then there's the guard option. To put it simply, there's always a chance that some people will try to rob you like your character is doing to others. Without a guard, the robbers will steal a lot more than they otherwise would. Even with a guard, you might steal lose some stuff unless your survivors are equipped with firearms at least. 

As time passes, you'll find yourself running shorter and shorter on certain supplies so it's generally wise to plan ahead. Hint: you'll need food and wood. It's also a bit frustrating when your characters fall sick due to inadequate heating or they take a wound that ends up festering and then they die due to a lack of medical supplies. It just really eats at you because sometimes it just seems so futile trying to treat them and they're not getting better. But that's one of the plus points of the game I guess. 

Overall, this is a pretty interesting game and definitely one I recommend getting. It's not flashy but it does have its own certain charm. 


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