(ENG) REVIEW: This War of Mine & The Little Ones_PC/PS4/XBOXOne

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Have you ever thought about how lucky you are? Living in your house, with food, your parents, meeting your friends and doing everything you want to do? Well, forget it. I mean everything. You have no more than a thing. There is war outside; you do not know why, but suddenly bombs start to explode next to your place. Your house is gone, you have to run away alone with just few things to survive a couple of days. At last you find other people and an old ruined house where you and the other two guys can repair in. From here “This War of Mine” begins. The events happen during the siege of Sarajevo between 1992 and 1996.

You (AKA from now “the player”) have to make sure that three roommates can survive in the best way possible and as long as possible. In the first scene you will see your characters with their own skills and story; in my first play I started with a journalist, an athlete and a chef. Sometimes these characters happen to know each other in the past, as you will read in an explanatory text that will also introduce you to the basic storyline. After that, from each character card (on the bottom right of your screen), you will see how they can manage in various situations. Easter egg ahead: I was very impressed when I heard that the characters of the game where based on the real developers of 11 bit Studio (but seriously guys, the eye blinking of the cards is sooooo creepy!).

From the starting point you will have to search in each and every wardrobe you will find looking for food or tools for building beds, radio and so on. as you must be able to maintain the characters’ humor and health high: during the day this will be you only purpose. Sometimes you will have to be more careful as someone will approach to your house: he could be interested to give his stuff in exchange for yours or maybe he just want to steal all your food and kill your poor survivors. That is why you will have to build weapons to defend yourself or even to attack during night’s hours. Moreover, you will meet other people scavenging for food and resources. There is no help: sometimes you will need to take their stuff (I AM SO SORRY OLD COUPLE! I KILLED FOR FOOD! I WAS STARVING). But not only your, the player, humor will matter. Every choice you make during these moments will have consequences on the humor of the roommates. THAT IS the moment when you finally realize what you are capable of when the food is lacking and war is outside your wall, having no idea about when there will be an end to all of this.

I cried the first time, when I had to kill two old men (I AM SO SORRY) having been without food  for almost three days (I SWEAR I WAS STARVING). Obviously my characters were shocked, but I realized how lucky I was to stay alive with everything at my fingertips. This title can not be considered as a game, it is a life experience.

-Drawning in Draws

Considering the graphic aspect, it's really difficult to find something wrong. The game runs smoothly and is clean in every situation. There is nothing much heavy to burden for our PCs through the whole experience, because the real power of  “This War of Mine” resides in simplicity. The developers concerned to polish every light effect, texture and every single animation that makes our character so real. Doing that, they (the characters) become the focal point of the scenes. They Kind of "pop out" from the beautifully hand drawned background (for witch you can choose from two different stiles, smooth or rough) and they make one with the ambients they are moving in. That give us a deep feeling of immersion in a more tridimensional world, even if we are moving in only 2D. Thanks to the light and shadow effects, you can get that feeling from the cold gentle white glimmer of the moon or by the dancing warm popping of a campfire in an abandoned house.

Concerning the houses, you will spend the most part of the game scattering for resources in them (honestly, I can assure that you will never find a repetitive environment). "God is in details" and they are the thing that make every explorable ambience in “This War of Mine” peculiar in some way. Let it be a family picture of the wall, furniture, room dimension and order: every building has been deeply characterized, developed as so the gameplay aspect could even be enhanced through this kind of care.  As a result, level design, even if simple, works great and manages to fit different play stiles and approaches to the game mechanics.

-Surviving a War is a Hard business

You have to survive a war. I am sure that many are thinking "I've seen that in other games! Find a gun and shoot to everything that moves". But “This War of Mine” is not that kind of survival game. Starting from the inedit point of view, a lateral 2D "platformesque" one, the game puts us in a condition never seen before. You are not a brave soldier, not even a bear grylls fan. You are a common person, a father maybe (if you have got the DLC expansion "The Little ones", of which I will talk later on) and your life has been stranded away, turned apart by a sudden war. You feel lost, you are desperate, but not alone. For this reason, when the game starts, you will find out that it puts you in front of 3 survivors, whose story is narrated in a short text At The beginnin of each session. This again is a different point of view on the survival aspect, as you will care the needs of different survivors, each one with their own problems, apart from thirst and hunger. Someone will start wounded or ill, others will suddenly fall in depression as a night incursor in the house you will be provided as shelter will steal your precious food or resources. Go and look for food, go now! Time is running! Since you start your game in the shelter you only have a day (approximately -- minutes) to search the environment you are in! Ok, already feeling confused? That is it, my dear viewers. You HAVE TO feel confused the first time you play. You HAVE TO feel the despair of not knowing what to do and how to survive properly, as your world turn to dark and you make those poor survivors die one after another.

Looking closely at the mechanics, playing multiple stories, you will get better and better, understanding how much “This War of Mine” can be rewarding, when you manage to cook a proper meal for those poor souls, or build them a bed. You will learn by yourself the importance of some resources over others and how to craft them to build different items. “This War of Mine” is a rather simple game, packed with many different little gimmicks to learn properly in order to survive. The game is as crude with you as with your survivors and it won't tell you anything. You will need to read carefully all the charter description to understand someone's ability to run faster or carry more gear, making them perfect to go outside during night-time in abandoned buildings. Someone else is able to deal with other people, convincing them to ask less resources in exchange for others, someone is capable of cooking and so on.

As you will see, the game is divided in two parts: day and night. Day is meant for you to build objects in the shelter, feed survivors and make those who went outside in the night rest. At night-time you will have to choose, for example, who is going to guard the house and who is going to sleep. It is indeed a simple game play, but never repetitive. The character casual rotation for each new game and the different casual loots You can find in each stage balances the fact that the places you are going to explore are alwais the same in each different game. Even so, after a bigger amount of hour spent you may feel a little used to everything, but that is the natural course of event involving those kind of game. You may or may not like it: feeling lost, learning, mastering. The difficulty level cannot be set, unless you play custom. In that case you can sort of make the game easyer choosing some settings, or you use one of the thousand of fan mods you can find free on steam itself. But, as you understand, it is something that cannot be complained: this is a though game with though contents and a though story. So it is in order to better comunicate to the player the real feeling of being stuck in a war you didn't asked for.

Some technical note: there is no logout button (at least we did not find it). Even if the game has auto-save, it is a little uncomfortable to exit using alt-f4. As for bugs, there has been no graphic glitch according to our experience, but I had several game crush using the "Take all" option with some loots. So try not to use it, if you can, until a patch should eventually come.

-The Little Ones

Talking about "The little ones", which comes as a DLC for precious owners of the game and has already been included in the console version, you must think about it as a natural part of the game, since it adds the possibility to have children in the house. Their part is irrilevant, unless adults teaches them some crafting basics. Even so, they are a fundamental story-driving add, since they are implemented basically to make us cry. Game, did you really need to make me so sad??? *CRY* So, buy it if you really enjoyed the game because it can give you more stories to play with, more characters and an more different point of view than before on war. But do not expect it to deeply change.

-Conclusion: Many things

This review has been written “four hands”, by me, your Boss, and President ShinRa, so that we could communicate a wider range of experiences. Because we had many things to say. As we have already claimed, “This War of Mine” cannot be simply considered as “A game”, because of the deep feelings spreading out of every single pixel composing the art of it. Indeed, it CAN be considered just a survival game, a race against time to make all of your team member capable of surviving. In this way the more we dig into “This War of Mine”, the more we understand that it is multiple things altogheter, mixed in a melting pot of artistic quality and personal meanings, will and strength, sadness and joy. This, resulting in multiple ways to enjoy your personal experience. You want to survive as long as you can? You want to test your managing abilities? You want to know all the stories, and write many more of them, crying every drop of tears you can? Do it! It doesn’t matter what THIS WAR OF MINE is. Because it is many things. Everything you’ll ever need to know is that you need to play it, and you will, and maybe you’ll cry, maybe not, but surely, it is an experience that differs from anything you’ve ever seen on a videogame.

#GRAPHICS/ 9 

#SOUND/ 8

#STORY/ 8.5

#GAMEPLAY/ 9

#TIME/ 9 

#ONLINE-MULTIPLAYER/ x

#UNIQUE FEATURES/ 10

#PAST VS FUTURE/ 10

#FUN/ 9

#FUTURE EXPECTATION/ 10 

#UNPACK/ X

#PROBLEMS/ X

#OBJECTIVITY/ 10

in the end...

8.5 punti Asobu!

(that's not a mathematic average calculation)

HOW TO READ THIS 

GRAPHICS-SOUND/ That's easy enough not to need explanation, is it? But remember: high graphics does not mean high grade!;)
GAMEPLAY'/ Is the game responsive? Does it have e good amount of difficulty? ecc.
TIME/ How much time will it take to finish the game?
ONLINE/ How is the online play? Or: is there any online play?
SPECIAL FEATURE/ is there any feature in particular able to get the game a plus from it?
PAST VS FUTURE/ Has the game learned the lessions from its predecessors?
FUN/ Afar from any other evaluations: is the game fun to play?
EXPECTATIONE/ That's a mark to evaluate if the game will ever need improvements and/or DLC and/or any other patch. High grade means we need something, and that's not alwais a good thing...remeber!
PROBLEMS/ How many severe problems does the game have? 
UNPACK/ That's as easy as it seems: how is the game package? Is it particular?
OBJECTIVITY'/ That's a review to the reviewers: have we been influenced by any of our experience? Has that been a problem for our objectivity? For marks higher than 5 you can sleep well. If it's lower, just notice that we put more than some of our life experience in the review. So reduce the game evaluation by 1 to 2 point!

THERE YOU HAVE IT! Now go...and play some good games!