27.11.2018

'This War of Mine' is a war survival game inspired by the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict that, rather than putting you in the role of those fighting the war as is usually the case, makes a huge departure from the normal to place you in the shoes of a group of civilians caught up in the conflict and simply trying to survive day to day until a ceasefire is called.You start the game on day 1 of the war with a group of several survivors holed up in a partially destroyed and derelict building. The main goal of the game is to scavenge for the tools, items and raw materials required to provide your group with the basic needs of human survival, such as food-stuffs, fuel for burning and cooking,water, medicine and bandages, as well as those little luxuries and distractions that make living life in a warzone just about possible to bear, such as cigarettes, coffee, and books.Your characters may be male or female and have their own biography of how they found themselves to be caught up in the conflict, and may randomly start the game injured or sick as a result of the war time conditions. Characters may also have unique attributes which will make them more useful to your group and allow them to contribute more significantly towards its survival, such as being a skilled cook, a fast runner, good with herbs and medicines, or having knowledge of firearms for those occasions when conflict is necessary.The game includes the extra content 'the little ones', which introduces a new dynamic to the game play - namely that of children. Kids have no practical skills or use, and unlike adults they cannot scavenge or guard, clear rubble, cook or make items, and their role in the game is essentially simply to add that extra layer of realism and force the gamer to consider another aspect of conflict - namely what happens to those who are entirely dependent on others to help them survive? To this end you must ensure that the children in your care are well rested, well fed and kept free of illness and injury, but you also have to take the time to keep them entertained and show them love and attention in order to prevent them from becoming sad, scared or depressed. This can be done by allowing the children to play games scattered around your dwelling (such as hop-scotch, or drawing on a wall), or alternatively through the dialogue function where you can tell them a joke, answer their questions about why things are so terrible, or simply give them a hug. Naturally children are much more fragile and sensitive than adults, and if not looked after properly they can die, which can have a dramatic knock-on effect to the mentality of the rest of the group.Also included is the DLC ‘Father’s Promise’ - a story-driven experience released to celebrate the third anniversary of the games release and based on an audio-drama by award-winning Polish author Lukasz Orbitowski. You take on the role of Adam, a father trying to save his daughter Amelia from the horrors of war and escape the besieged city.The game follows a day/night cycle. During daylight hours you are restricted to the confines of your shelter because of the threat of snipers outside. Here you will spend your time tending to the needs of your group, improving the conditions in your home to make it safer or more comfortable, or manufacturing items that will aid your daily battle with survival.Actions required to ensure the wellbeing of your characters can be as simple as cooking a meal in order to ensure they do not starve to death, sleeping to ensure that they are well rested, giving them a break to rest and relax to ensure that they do not become sad or depressed, allowing them to consume alcohol and become drunk and blow off a little steam, bandaging wounds and administering medicines to heal them or fight of illnesses. Losing control of any of these aspects can result in your characters becoming weaker, slower, less productive, and if left unchecked will ultimately result in them dying.You can improve your circumstances by constructing comfortable chairs for your group to sit on, beds for them to sleep on so that they do not have to brave a cold concrete floor, better cooking facilities in order to produce more healthy and nutritious meals, a water butt to ensure a steady supply of clean water, barricades to make your home more secure from raiders, a machine shop with which to produce tools or fix weapons, animal traps with which to catch game, herb gardens to produce home-made medicines and cigarettes, even a still for producing moonshine amongst many other things. With enough raw building materials at your disposal, each facility can also be upgraded in order to produce more complex or effective items or effects.Occasionally your home will receive a call from a visitor. Often this is a travelling vendor who will allow you to exchange goods in your possession for other items that you require. All goods have a value that is determined by their scarcity, therefore common items such as cigarettes and building materials are not worth much in exchange, where as rarer items such as functional weapons, branded medicines and tinned foods are worth a great deal more.Sometimes that visitor may be a neighbour in need asking you to assist them with tasks such as moving an injured person, or guarding their home overnight. Assisting a neighbour will rob your group of an important member for 24 hours, although doing good deeds may eventually result in you being rewarded with gifts such as food or ammunition. Sometimes it will get you nothing material, although it may boost the mood of your group giving them a feeling of contentment.At night you may leave your home in order to scavenge nearby locations and gather much needed materials and items. The kinds of locations available are those you would expect to find in any large city and vary from homes, to schools, garages, hospitals, military facilities and supermarkets. The types of materials and items that are likely to be found in each of these locations is generally determined by the type of location, so a supermarket is usually a good source of food, a hospital a good source of medicines, and a construction site a good source of building materials. Some of these locations, such as the marketplace - which in some scenarios has been blasted by artillery fire - are undoubtedly intended to parallel real life events of the Siege of Sarajevo, such as the 'Markale Marketplace Massacre'.Ultimately however you are only human and so can only carry so much (between about ten to fifteen items), so you may have to visit locations several times before you have stripped them bare, and you will have to choose which items you intend to take home very carefully depending upon where your greatest need currently lies.Before you leave on a scavenging run however you must decide how those of your group that are left behind will spend their time. Of course sleep (and where you sleep) is important, but this is a warzone therefore you may feel the need to post one or more of your group on guard to protect your dwelling from raiders. When they come raiders will attempt to steal the items you have stocked, and if successful can leave you completely without essentials such as food or water. Alternatively if you have posted enough guards, your building has been reinforced, or those guards are well armed enough, you may be able to fight the raiders off, perhaps obtaining injuries from your efforts to do so or expending precious ammunition.Not all areas of every location are easily accessible, and some may require special tools or equipment that can be constructed in your workshop before you can enter them. Piles of rubble can be moved by hand, but are much easier to move with a shovel. Locked doors and containers are inaccessible, but can be busted open with a crowbar or picked with a lock pick. Metal bars may prevent you entry, but can be removed with a serrated saw blade. Other areas simply require you to have a sharp eye or a logical mind in order to deduce how entry can be gained. In most cases you will have to revisit a location several times with a variety of tools before it can be fully accessed.Of course in a war zone, whilst some locations are abandoned and can be scavenged at will, others are occupied either by other survivors or even by the military. Sometimes these other parties can be friendly and will simply allow you to go about your business gathering items. Occasionally one of them may have a story to tell you, may ask you for items they are in need of such as food in offer for a reward, or may have items that you can trade with them. Sometimes other parties are outright hostile either because they are military or because they are the occupants or owners of the property you are raiding and will protect it with lethal force.Negotiating such threats can be done via stealth - hiding in corners or behind furniture until the threat passes - or if you are lucky enough to have acquired a weapon or firearm, can be met head-on with lethal force of your own. Weapons range from a simple kitchen knife, to tools such as a crowbar, axe or spade, to firearms such as a handgun, assault rifle or shotgun - however ammunition is rare and so is to always be used sparingly, and your characters are vulnerable and not capable of withstanding more than a couple of injuries, although they can be made more hardy by finding or repairing items such as body armour or a helmet.If you survive your scavenge - and it is possible for members of your group to be killed requiring you to carry on your quest for survival without them and their skills - you will return home at which point the daytime cycle will commence once more. Well done - you have survived your first day in a warzone. You now just have to do it again and again, every day until a cease fire is called!Periodically you will experience certain events that effects how the game can be played. This may be an increase in the amount of fighting, or heavy snowfall - both of which may restrict access to certain parts of the map for a number of days, forcing you to reconsider your scavenging activities, potentially risk going to areas that you would normally avoid because of danger, or alternatively consider stealing or other immoral acts in order to get by. Events also include 'shortages' of key materials such as coffee, cigarettes and wood, which not only effect your access to such items but also lead to increased prices of such items when bought and sold on the black market. If you find yourself well stocked in in-demand items then this may present an opportunity to cash in, however if you find yourself short of them then it may present you with a tricky problem of how to get by without them.The game also asks you to make moral choices at every turn. When children come knocking on your door asking for valuable medication for their sick mother, do you give it to them or keep hold of them for yourself? Do you donate food to a homeless man living in a shelled out ruin? Do you expose a neighbour for stealing when the military come calling offering a reward? Do you rob a rich house hold - after all they have so much and you have so little? Do you help take a gunshot victim to the hospital? Will you scavenge only from neutral areas that are fair game, or will you resort to violence and take from innocents simply because they have what you need? Do you donate to a local hospital still trying to operate despite the conflict?All of these actions, good and bad, contribute in some way to the mood of your group. Robbing an elderly couple may get you the food, materials and meds you desperately need, but when they subsequently starve to death in their home because of your criminality, what impact will that have on the state of mind of your group? Your characters are not amoral - although some are more prone to sensitivity than others - and every decision comes with some kind of price.Your actions throughout the game also contribute towards what kind of ending each of your character experiences once the game is completed. 'Karma' is heavily involved in these endings and will determine whether your characters manage to rebuild their lives after the war has ended, whether they are permanently damaged by their experiences, or indeed whether they survive at all.Graphically the game is simple but excellent. It’s a 2 dimensional side-scrolling platform adventure, and is almost entirely in black and white, which only adds to the bleak atmosphere and general tone that along with locations that look as though they could have been lifted directly from any conflict - complete with ruined buildings, burning vehicles, casualties and corpses - brilliantly emulates the experience of living in a real life war zone. Artillery can be heard in the back ground, and the silence can be suddenly shattered by the sound of automatic fire or a snipers bullet.The game also has an incredible amount of customisability and replay value. There are a total of thirteen standard scenarios that can be unlocked. The survivors you start with will be pre-determined (between one and four depending on the scenario chosen), and the conflict will last a specific number of days. Shortages of materials and items will occur at a predetermined time, winter will strike at a pre-determined point and last for a specific number of days, and the number of locations that are available for scavenging runs will also be pre-set.However, launch a custom game and you are free to determine the size of your group, the skills they have, their character models, names and portraits, the length of the conflict before ceasefire, the hostility of the warzone, the scarcity of resources, when winter arrives, how long it lasts, and how oppressive the bad weather is.In short, 'This War of Mine' is a brilliant game of a type that I have never seen before, providing a unique playing experience. Many games in the past have utilised resource management as a tool of gameplay, yet no game has to my knowledge ever made that mundanity so frighteningly desperate and crucial to success, or so entertaining. The game succeeds in keeping you on a knife-edge throughout. Supplies are *always* rare and you will rarely experience a time in which you feel you are safe enough or well stocked enough to relax.It would be crass and disrespectful to suggest that any game can ever truly reproduce exactly what it feels like to live through war or the horror and suffering that war produces, but I feel that 'This War of Mine' is so well made and so well researched that it must come closer to doing so than any other game ever has. It gets my highest recommendation.

14.3.2016

'This War of Mine' is a war survival game inspired by the seige of Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict that, rather than putting you in the role of those fighting the war as is usually the case, makes a huge departure from the normal to place you in the shoes of a group of civillians caught up in the conflict and simply trying to survive day to day until a ceasefire is called.You start the game on day 1 of the war with a a group of several survivors holed up in a partially destroyed and derelict building. The main goal of the game is to scavenge for the tools, items and raw materials required to provide your group with the basic needs of human survival, such as food-stuffs, fuel for burning and cooking,water, medicine and bandages, as well as those little luxuries and distractions that make living life in a warzone just about possible to bear, such as cigarettes, coffee, and books.Your characters may be male or female and have their own biography of how they found themselves to be caught up in the conflict, and may randomly start the game injured or sick as a result of the war time conditions. Characters may also have unique attributes which will make them more useful to your group and allow them to contribute more significantly towards its survival, such as being a skilled cook, a fast runner, good with herbs and medicines, or having knowledge of firearms for those occasions when conflict is necessary.The game includes the extra content 'the little ones', which introduces a new dynamic to the game play - namely that of children. Kids have no practical skills or use, and unlike adults they cannot scavenge or guard, clear rubble, cook or make items, and their role in the game is essentially simply to add that extra layer of realism and force the gamer to consider another aspect of conflict - namely what happens to those who are entirely dependant on others to help them survive? To this end you must ensure that the children in your care are well rested, well fed and kept free of illness and injury, but you also have to take the time to keep them entertained and show them love and attention in order to prevent them from becoming sad, scared or depressed. This can be done by allowing the children to play games scattered around your dwelling (such as hop-scotch, or drawing on a wall), or alternatively through the dialogue function where you can tell them a joke, answer their questions about why things are so terrible, or simply give them a hug. Naturally children are much more fragile and sensitive than adults, and if not looked after properly they can die, which can have a dramatic knock-on effect to the mentality of the rest of the group.The game follows a day/night cycle. During daylight hours you are restricted to the confines of your shelter because of the threat of snipers outside. Here you will spend your time tending to the needs of your group, improving the conditions in your home to make it safer or more comfortable, or manufacturing items that will aid your daily battle with survival.Actions required to ensure the well being of your characters can be as simple as cooking a meal in order to ensure they do not starve to death, sleeping to ensure that they are well rested, giving them a break to rest and relax to ensure that they do not become sad or depressed, allowing them to consume alcohol and become drunk and blow off a little steam, bandaging wounds and administering medicines to heal them or fight of illnesses. Losing control of any of these aspects can result in your characters becoming weaker, slower, less productive, and if left unchecked will ultimately result in them dying.You can improve your circumstances by constructing comfortable chairs for your group to sit on, beds for them to sleep on so that they do not have to brave a cold concrete floor, better cooking facilities in order to produce more healthy and nutritious meals, a water butt to ensure a steady supply of clean water, barracades to make your home more secure from raiders, a machine shop with which to produce tools or fix weapons, animal traps with which to catch game, herb gardens to produce home-made medicines and cigarettes, even a still for producing moonshine amongst many other things. With enough raw building materials at your disposal, each facility can also be upgraded in order to produce more complex or effective items or effects.Occasionally your home will receive a call from a visitor. Often this is a travelling vendor who will allow you to exchange goods in your possession for other items that you require. All goods have a value that is determined by their scarcity, therefore common items such as cigarettes and building materials are not worth much in exchange, where as rarer items such as functional weapons, branded medicines and tinned foods are worth a great deal more.Sometimes that visitor may be a neighbour in need asking you to assist them with tasks such as moving an injured person, or guarding their home overnight. Assisting a neighbour will rob your group of an important member for 24 hours, although doing good deeds may eventually result in you being rewarded with gifts such as food or ammunition. Sometimes it will get you nothing material, although it may boost the mood of your group giving them a feeling of contentment.At night you may leave your home in order to scavenge nearby locations and gather much needed materials and items. The kinds of locations availible are those you would expect to find in any large city and vary from homes, to schools, garages, hospitals, military facilities and supermarkets. The types of materials and items that are likely to be found in each of these locations is generally determined by the type of location, so a supermarket is usually a good source of food, a hospital a good source of medicines, and a construction site a good source of building materials. Some of these locations, such as the marketplace - which in some scenarios has been blasted by artillery fire - are undoubtedly intended to parallel real life events of the Seige of Sarajevo, such as the 'Markale Marketplace Massacre'.Ultimately however you are only human and so can only carry so much (between about ten to fifteen items), so you may have to visit locations several times before you have stripped them bare, and you will have to choose which items you intend to take home very carefully depending upon where your greatest need currently lies.Before you leave on a scavenging run however you must decide how those of your group that are left behind will spend their time. Of course sleep (and where you sleep) is important, but this is a warzone therefore you may feel the need to post one or more of your group on guard to protect your dwelling from raiders. When they come raiders will attempt to steal the items you have stocked, and if successful can leave you completely without essentials such as food or water. Alternatively if you have posted enough guards, your building has been reinforced, or those guards are well armed enough, you may be able to fight the raiders off, perhaps obtaining injuries from your efforts to do so or expending precious ammunition.Not all areas of every location are easily accessible, and some may require special tools or equipment that can be constructed in your workshop before you can enter them. Piles or rubble can be moved by hand, but are much easier to move with a shovel. Locked doors and containers are inaccessible, but can be busted open with a crowbar or picked with a lock pick. Metal bars may prevent you entry, but can be removed with a serrated saw blade. Other areas simply require you to have a sharp eye or a logical mind in order to deduce how entry can be gained. In most cases you will have to revisit a location several times with a variety of tools before it can be fully accessed.Of course in a war zone, whilst some locations are abandoned and can be scavenged at will, others are occupied either by other survivors or even by the military. Sometimes these other parties can be friendly and will simply allow you to go about your business gathering items. Occasionally one of them may have a story to tell you, may ask you for items they are in need of such as food in offer for a reward, or may have items that you can trade with them. Sometimes other parties are outright hostile either because they are military or because they are the occupants or owners of the property you are raiding and will protect it with lethal force.Negotiating such threats can be done via stealth - hiding in corners or behind furniture until the threat passes - or if you are lucky enough to have acquired a weapon or firearm, can be met head-on with lethal force of your own. Weapons range from a simple kitchen knife, to tools such as a crowbar, axe or spade, to firearms such as a handgun, assault rifle or shotgun - however ammunition is rare and so is to always be used sparingly, and your characters are vulnerable and not capible of withstanding more than a couple of injuries, although they can be made more hardy by finding or repairing items such as body armour or a helmet.If you survive your scavenge - and it is possible for members of your group to be killed requiring you to carry on your quest for survival without them and their skills - you will return home at which point the daytime cycle will commence once more. Well done - you have survived your first day in a warzone. You now just have to do it again and again, every day until a cease fire is called!Periodically you will experience certain events that effects how the game can be played. This may be an increase in the amount of fighting, or heavy snowfall - both of which may restrict access to certain parts of the map for a number of days, forcing you to reconsider your scavenging activities, potentially risk going to areas that you would normally avoid because of danger, or alternatively consider stealing or other immoral acts in order to get by. Events also include 'shortages' of key materials such as coffee, cigarettes and wood, which not only effect your access to such items but also lead to increased prices of such items when bought and sold on the black market. If you find yourself well stocked in in-demand items then this may present an opportunity to cash in, however if you find yourself short of them then it may present you with a tricky problem of how to get by without them.The game also asks you to make moral choices at every turn. When children come knocking on your door asking for valuable medication for their sick mother, do you give it to them or keep hold of them for yourself? Do you donate food to a homeless man living in a shelled out ruin? Do you expose a neighbour for stealing when the military come calling offering a reward? Do you rob a rich house hold - after all they have so much and you have so little? Do you help take a gun shot victim to the hospital? Will you scavenge only from neutral areas that are fair game, or will you resort to violence and take from innocents simply because they have what you need? Do you donate to a local hospital still trying to operate despite the conflict?All of these actions, good and bad, contribute in some way to the mood of your group. Robbing an elderly couple may get you the food, materials and meds you desperately need, but when they subsequently starve to death in their home because of your criminality, what impact will that have on the state of mind of your group? Your characters are not ammoral - although some are more prone to sensitivity than others - and every decision comes with some kind of price.Your actions throughout the game also contribute towards what kind of ending each of your character experiences once the game is completed. 'Karma' is heavily involved in these endings and will determine whether your characters manage to rebuild their lives after the war has ended, whether they are perminantly damaged by their experiences, or indeed whether they survive at all.Graphically the game is simple but excellent. Its a 2 dimensional side-scrolling platform adventure, and is almost entirely in black and white, which only adds to the bleak atmosphere and general tone that along with locations that look as though they could have been lifted directly from any conflict - complete with ruined buildings, burning vehicles, casualties and corpses - brilliantly emulates the experience of living in a real life war zone. Artillery can be heard in the back ground, and the silence can be suddenly shattered by the sound of automatic fire or a snipers bullet.The game also has an incredible amount of customisability and replay value. There are a total of thirteen standard scenarios that can be unlocked. The survivors you start with will be pre-determined (between one and four depending on the scenario chosen), and the conflict will last a specific number of days. Shortages of materials and items will occur at a preset time, winter will strike at a pre-determined point and last for a specific number of days, and the number of locations that are availible for scavenging runs will also be pre-set.However, launch a custom game and you are free to determine the size of your group, the skills they have, their character models, names and portraits, the length of the conflict before ceasefire, the hostility of the warzone, the scarcity of resources, when winter arrives, how long it lasts, and how oppressive the bad weather is.In short, 'This War of Mine' is a brilliant game of a type that I have never seen before, providing a unique playing experience. Many games in the past have utilised resource management as a tool of gameplay, yet no game has to my knowledge ever made that mundanity so frighteningly desperate and crucial to success, or so entertaining. The game succeeds in keeping you on a knife-edge throughout. Supplies are *always* rare and you will rarely experience a time in which you feel you are safe enough or well stocked enough to relax.It would be crass and disrespectful to suggest that any game can ever truely reproduce exactly what it feels like to live through war or the horror and suffering that war produces, but I feel that 'This War of Mine' is so well made and so well researched that it must come closer to doing so than any other game ever has. It gets my highest recommendation.

3.2.2016

'This War of Mine' is a war survival game inspired by the seige of Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict that, rather than putting you in the role of those fighting the war as is usually the case, makes a huge departure from the normal to place you in the shoes of a group of civillians caught up in the conflict and simply trying to survive day to day until a ceasefire is called.You start the game on day 1 of the war with a a group of several survivors holed up in a partially destroyed and derelict building. The main goal of the game is to scavenge for the tools, items and raw materials required to provide your group with the basic needs of human survival, such as food-stuffs, fuel for burning and cooking,water, medicine and bandages, as well as those little luxuries and distractions that make living life in a warzone just about possible to bear, such as cigarettes, coffee, and books.Your characters may be male or female and have their own biography of how they found themselves to be caught up in the conflict, and may randomly start the game injured or sick as a result of the war time conditions. Characters may also have unique attributes which will make them more useful to your group and allow them to contribute more significantly towards its survival, such as being a skilled cook, a fast runner, good with herbs and medicines, or having knowledge of firearms for those occasions when conflict is necessary.The game includes the extra content 'the little ones', which introduces a new dynamic to the game play - namely that of children. Kids have no practical skills or use, and unlike adults they cannot scavenge or guard, clear rubble, cook or make items, and their role in the game is essentially simply to add that extra layer of realism and force the gamer to consider another aspect of conflict - namely what happens to those who are entirely dependant on others to help them survive? To this end you must ensure that the children in your care are well rested, well fed and kept free of illness and injury, but you also have to take the time to keep them entertained and show them love and attention in order to prevent them from becoming sad, scared or depressed. This can be done by allowing the children to play games scattered around your dwelling (such as hop-scotch, or drawing on a wall), or alternatively through the dialogue function where you can tell them a joke, answer their questions about why things are so terrible, or simply give them a hug. Naturally children are much more fragile and sensitive than adults, and if not looked after properly they can die, which can have a dramatic knock-on effect to the mentality of the rest of the group.The game follows a day/night cycle. During daylight hours you are restricted to the confines of your shelter because of the threat of snipers outside. Here you will spend your time tending to the needs of your group, improving the conditions in your home to make it safer or more comfortable, or manufacturing items that will aid your daily battle with survival.Actions required to ensure the well being of your characters can be as simple as cooking a meal in order to ensure they do not starve to death, sleeping to ensure that they are well rested, giving them a break to rest and relax to ensure that they do not become sad or depressed, allowing them to consume alcohol and become drunk and blow off a little steam, bandaging wounds and administering medicines to heal them or fight of illnesses. Losing control of any of these aspects can result in your characters becoming weaker, slower, less productive, and if left unchecked will ultimately result in them dying.You can improve your circumstances by constructing comfortable chairs for your group to sit on, beds for them to sleep on so that they do not have to brave a cold concrete floor, better cooking facilities in order to produce more healthy and nutritious meals, a water butt to ensure a steady supply of clean water, barracades to make your home more secure from raiders, a machine shop with which to produce tools or fix weapons, animal traps with which to catch game, herb gardens to produce home-made medicines and cigarettes, even a still for producing moonshine amongst many other things. With enough raw building materials at your disposal, each facility can also be upgraded in order to produce more complex or effective items or effects.Occasionally your home will receive a call from a visitor. Often this is a travelling vendor who will allow you to exchange goods in your possession for other items that you require. All goods have a value that is determined by their scarcity, therefore common items such as cigarettes and building materials are not worth much in exchange, where as rarer items such as functional weapons, branded medicines and tinned foods are worth a great deal more.Sometimes that visitor may be a neighbour in need asking you to assist them with tasks such as moving an injured person, or guarding their home overnight. Assisting a neighbour will rob your group of an important member for 24 hours, although doing good deeds may eventually result in you being rewarded with gifts such as food or ammunition. Sometimes it will get you nothing material, although it may boost the mood of your group giving them a feeling of contentment.At night you may leave your home in order to scavenge nearby locations and gather much needed materials and items. The kinds of locations availible are those you would expect to find in any large city and vary from homes, to schools, garages, hospitals, military facilities and supermarkets. The types of materials and items that are likely to be found in each of these locations is generally determined by the type of location, so a supermarket is usually a good source of food, a hospital a good source of medicines, and a construction site a good source of building materials. Some of these locations, such as the marketplace - which in some scenarios has been blasted by artillery fire - are undoubtedly intended to parallel real life events of the Seige of Sarajevo, such as the 'Markale Marketplace Massacre'.Ultimately however you are only human and so can only carry so much (between about ten to fifteen items), so you may have to visit locations several times before you have stripped them bare, and you will have to choose which items you intend to take home very carefully depending upon where your greatest need currently lies.Before you leave on a scavenging run however you must decide how those of your group that are left behind will spend their time. Of course sleep (and where you sleep) is important, but this is a warzone therefore you may feel the need to post one or more of your group on guard to protect your dwelling from raiders. When they come raiders will attempt to steal the items you have stocked, and if successful can leave you completely without essentials such as food or water. Alternatively if you have posted enough guards, your building has been reinforced, or those guards are well armed enough, you may be able to fight the raiders off, perhaps obtaining injuries from your efforts to do so or expending precious ammunition.Not all areas of every location are easily accessible, and some may require special tools or equipment that can be constructed in your workshop before you can enter them. Piles or rubble can be moved by hand, but are much easier to move with a shovel. Locked doors and containers are inaccessible, but can be busted open with a crowbar or picked with a lock pick. Metal bars may prevent you entry, but can be removed with a serrated saw blade. Other areas simply require you to have a sharp eye or a logical mind in order to deduce how entry can be gained. In most cases you will have to revisit a location several times with a variety of tools before it can be fully accessed.Of course in a war zone, whilst some locations are abandoned and can be scavenged at will, others are occupied either by other survivors or even by the military. Sometimes these other parties can be friendly and will simply allow you to go about your business gathering items. Occasionally one of them may have a story to tell you, may ask you for items they are in need of such as food in offer for a reward, or may have items that you can trade with them. Sometimes other parties are outright hostile either because they are military or because they are the occupants or owners of the property you are raiding and will protect it with lethal force.Negotiating such threats can be done via stealth - hiding in corners or behind furniture until the threat passes - or if you are lucky enough to have acquired a weapon or firearm, can be met head-on with lethal force of your own. Weapons range from a simple kitchen knife, to tools such as a crowbar, axe or spade, to firearms such as a handgun, assault rifle or shotgun - however ammunition is rare and so is to always be used sparingly, and your characters are vulnerable and not capible of withstanding more than a couple of injuries, although they can be made more hardy by finding or repairing items such as body armour or a helmet.If you survive your scavenge - and it is possible for members of your group to be killed requiring you to carry on your quest for survival without them and their skills - you will return home at which point the daytime cycle will commence once more. Well done - you have survived your first day in a warzone. You now just have to do it again and again, every day until a cease fire is called!Periodically you will experience certain events that effects how the game can be played. This may be an increase in the amount of fighting, or heavy snowfall - both of which may restrict access to certain parts of the map for a number of days, forcing you to reconsider your scavenging activities, potentially risk going to areas that you would normally avoid because of danger, or alternatively consider stealing or other immoral acts in order to get by. Events also include 'shortages' of key materials such as coffee, cigarettes and wood, which not only effect your access to such items but also lead to increased prices of such items when bought and sold on the black market. If you find yourself well stocked in in-demand items then this may present an opportunity to cash in, however if you find yourself short of them then it may present you with a tricky problem of how to get by without them.The game also asks you to make moral choices at every turn. When children come knocking on your door asking for valuable medication for their sick mother, do you give it to them or keep hold of them for yourself? Do you donate food to a homeless man living in a shelled out ruin? Do you expose a neighbour for stealing when the military come calling offering a reward? Do you rob a rich house hold - after all they have so much and you have so little? Do you help take a gun shot victim to the hospital? Will you scavenge only from neutral areas that are fair game, or will you resort to violence and take from innocents simply because they have what you need? Do you donate to a local hospital still trying to operate despite the conflict?All of these actions, good and bad, contribute in some way to the mood of your group. Robbing an elderly couple may get you the food, materials and meds you desperately need, but when they subsequently starve to death in their home because of your criminality, what impact will that have on the state of mind of your group? Your characters are not ammoral - although some are more prone to sensitivity than others - and every decision comes with some kind of price.Your actions throughout the game also contribute towards what kind of ending each of your character experiences once the game is completed. 'Karma' is heavily involved in these endings and will determine whether your characters manage to rebuild their lives after the war has ended, whether they are perminantly damaged by their experiences, or indeed whether they survive at all.Graphically the game is simple but excellent. Its a 2 dimensional side-scrolling platform adventure, and is almost entirely in black and white, which only adds to the bleak atmosphere and general tone that along with locations that look as though they could have been lifted directly from any conflict - complete with ruined buildings, burning vehicles, casualties and corpses - brilliantly emulates the experience of living in a real life war zone. Artillery can be heard in the back ground, and the silence can be suddenly shattered by the sound of automatic fire or a snipers bullet.The game also has an incredible amount of customisability and replay value. There are a total of thirteen standard scenarios that can be unlocked. The survivors you start with will be pre-determined (between one and four depending on the scenario chosen), and the conflict will last a specific number of days. Shortages of materials and items will occur at a preset time, winter will strike at a pre-determined point and last for a specific number of days, and the number of locations that are availible for scavenging runs will also be pre-set.However, launch a custom game and you are free to determine the size of your group, the skills they have, their character models, names and portraits, the length of the conflict before ceasefire, the hostility of the warzone, the scarcity of resources, when winter arrives, how long it lasts, and how oppressive the bad weather is.In short, 'This War of Mine' is a brilliant game of a type that I have never seen before, providing a unique playing experience. Many games in the past have utilised resource management as a tool of gameplay, yet no game has to my knowledge ever made that mundanity so frighteningly desperate and crucial to success, or so entertaining. The game succeeds in keeping you on a knife-edge throughout. Supplies are *always* rare and you will rarely experience a time in which you feel you are safe enough or well stocked enough to relax.It would be crass and disrespectful to suggest that any game can ever truely reproduce exactly what it feels like to live through war or the horror and suffering that war produces, but I feel that 'This War of Mine' is so well made and so well researched that it must come closer to doing so than any other game ever has. It gets my highest recommendation.

15.3.2016

So I bought this game for the graphical style, which is quite a poor reason to buy a game, but nevermind. But I found it instantly likeable. I seen some negative reviews about controls but I haven't found this (on PS4 version). Pressing up on the controller makes them walk upstairs, and tapping the controller gently makes them sneak instead of run... its pretty simple stuff! I found it was a little bit like The Sims, but set at war. You need to keep attributes high with very little resources and getting the balancing act right is extremely satisfying. The randomness and sheer unfairness of the game also adds to its charm in my opinion. So one time, i was scavenging at a hospital,

31.1.2016

I have never written a review before for anything and I feel this game deserves this rating! This game is a survival/crafting side scroller set in a war zone, but rather than playing as a battle hardened soldier, you play as helpless, defenceless civilians trapped in the area trying to survive. The survival aspect of the game is spot on, scavenge at night time for supplies to keep your group of survivors healthy and happy while facing the threat of other survivors. Once a character dies, they don't come back witch adds to the tension and importance of each scavenge trip. Raiders can break into your shelter and take your supplies leaving your group to starve. The atmosphere of the game is perfect,

29.4.2016

This is an unusual game, but I do enjoy playing it. You play as a group of survivors in a war torn city, scavenging for food and other supplies, including weapon parts, medicine, etc.You have to assign different tasks to the different characters, depending on their skill set and send people out nightly to scavenge and hope they get home before th morning alive and in one piece. The choices you have to make affect what happens to the characters and the first time I played it, it was only a matter of days before my characters all died. It is quite a though provoking game and you have to think through all of your actions and sometimes make tough decisions.I would recommend this game if you enjoy

7.5.2016

I enjoy a good strategy game so this game jumped right out at me! I was a little concerned after seeing photos of the game as I thought it looked quite basic but I was very wrong. This game is highly interesting and tons of fun!Basically, you are in the middle of a war zone and there are three players of which you can control. You focus on improving the derelict building you have taken sanctuary in whilst leaving each night to scavenge for food, medical supplies and other items to build items for your building.I have not long taken delivery of the game and I've played for hours as it's just so addictive.

22.3.2016

To be honest I have only played This War of Mine for android. It is truly a gutt wrenching experience. The choices you make to keep your survivors that way is awful. I can only imagine how much higher the stakes are in this latest installment. It is not enjoyable but it is a great game that will draw you into it. So far I have survived with a team of 3 for 40 days.

2.3.2016

I bought this game a while ago and I've got to say I am definitely impressed. My first play through everybody died and I made some stupid in-game decisions, which genuinely made me feel emotional. When the child in the group ran away I was heartbroken. If you're going to buy this game, stock up on the kleenex.

11.3.2016

Instant classic. Broken the monotony of all these brain dead shooters and sub-par RPGs doing the rounds at the moment. It's a clever game that makes you want to do better each time you play.

4.2.2016

A totally diffrent way of looking at war, other than with a gun in your hand, some really tough choices to be made, it can pull on the heart strings at times though.

13.3.2016

It's just as I had hoped fun, sad and happy at times this game makes yoiu feel soo good about yourself every time you make a choice to help people out love it

10.2.2017

A great if slightly morbid game. It is a game about choices which will play on your mind or hinder you depending on how you play

22.9.2016

Excellent product, just as described. Prompt delivery and game works fine. Would recommend and order from here again.

28.8.2017

Hands down one of the best games I've ever played. The graphic style of it is brilliant, and I adore the concept.

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