This War of Mine earned some pretty impressive kudos when it came out. That’s no surprise given its premise of playing a group of civilians looking to survive a siege of their home city. Heck, the developers even partnered with a charity for children who are victims of war for authenticity. Looking at the screenshots, I also found the two-dimensional cutaways of buildings with lots of elements that you can interact with to be very appealing.
After actually playing it, I realized that its gameplay is really quite close to that of Zafehouse Diaries, which I had mixed feelings about. Obviously the night and daytime are reversed. Your survivors stay indoors during the daytime (due to a fear of snipers in the city) where they can sleep, build stuff inside your shelter, eat and so forth. At night, you typically send one person out to scavenge or trade for resources while the others stand guard against looters or rest back home. Plus everything plays out in real time in this game, except for raids against your shelter for which you only get a generated report, while everything was turn-based in Zafehouse Diaries. The idea is simply to survive until the end of the war.
After reading all of the praise for this game, I’d expected it to be more narratively-driven. It’s true that each of the unique characters in this game does have his or her own life story which are gradually revealed as snippets of text that are unlocked as time passes but that’s just pre-written backstory. There are also events such as children coming to your doorstep to beg for food, or neighbors asking for help to fortify their own shelter and your decision is recorded as part of the whole story. But the main gameplay loop is your basic sandbox survival system: gather resources, spend resources to build up your shelter, save up resources to survive when times are bad. You do have to decide whether or not to steal from other civilians, and doing so can make your characters sad, but it’s not that hard to survive without resorting to such measures or just steal from the aggressive bandits that no one really cares about.
I’ve written before about how I pretty much suck at this type of game but after getting over my panic about the real-time nature of the gameplay, I found that this actually isn’t so difficult. Your characters can starve for quite a few days before it becomes an issue. Another important lesson is that trade is hugely important and some resources are way more valuable than others. There’s little point in scavenging wood which only stack to two units per inventory slot when you can get medicines which when sold to the travelling peddler can get you a whole inventory full of wood. This is doubly important since you can only send one person out each night regardless of how large your group, a restriction that feels artificial and seems needed only to make the game easier to balance.
I’m also disappointed that all of the locations available are essentially pre-generated. Which location you get in your town is random but once you see the supermarket location for example, its layout and what it contains is always the same. It would be much more interesting if they could have come up with a way to procedurally generate these locations. Similarly every game will have a winter period during which it gets very cold so you’ll need to have a heater and fuel for the heater or else your survivors will get sick and die plus a crime wave period during which raids against your shelter happen more often and are more vicious. There’s some variability in when these events happen but they are sure to happen. For these reasons, I’m not convinced that there’s a ton of replayability in this unless you really want to unlock the life story of each character or fully leverage each character’s special ability.
Anyway I didn’t get the emotional impact that many reviewers wrote about but I did enjoy it as one of the very few sandbox survival games that is easy enough and short enough that I can actually make it all the way to the end.
