Developer: 11 Bit Studios
Publisher: Deep Silver
Platforms: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Mac, Android, Pc
Tested on: PlayStation 4
This War Of Mine: The Little Ones – Review
War games where you aren’t an overpowered, armoured badass, mowing down the opposition with an abundance of ammunition are few. Games where you are to survive the destruction wrought by the conflict are even fewer. This War of Mine: The Little Ones is just that. Forget trying to murder enemies by the dozens, you’ll need everything you can muster to just survive each day.
Story
The story behind: This War of Mine: The Little Ones is different every time you start over. In the normal story mode you’ll have to oversee the survival of three refugees. If you want to know more about the refugees, there is a biography about them which lets you read up on their history. Delving into their pasts, you realise just how trivial the character’s lives were before the conflict took everything away, everything that was exciting, beautiful, mundane, boring or even everyday. Everything went from being normal to shit and your characters got stuck with what’s left, which isn’t much.
Graphics
The graphics of This War of Mine: The Little Ones aren’t current generation, then again the game is available on a large amount of devices, so high resolution graphics probably wasn’t a possiblity but that doesn’t mean anything. The art design of the game is dark and grim. Grey dilapitated buildings, destruction all around and total. The immersion that the game creates is also responsible for the claustrophobic and depressing nature of This War of Mine: The Little Ones.
You’ll start with the idea that you’ll make it just fine, but as the in-game days pass by and things start to go from bad to worse, the animations of the characters also changes. Whatever ails them will soon become visible. If they are wounded, tired or starving their movements change to a limp, and they become sluggish. This creates an urgency for whatever you need, be it food, medicine or bandages. You’ll keep thinking: ‘Just one more container to look through for whatever it is to make it through another day.
Sound
If you think about it, music is often the biggest maker or breaker of the ambience in a game. This is no difference in this game. Whenever you are out in the field, the only thing you’ll hear are the background noises, be it crackling fires or the rustling of the leaves in the wind. It creates an atmosphere of desolation and makes the scavaging very tense. There is no voice acting, seeing as this game is released on a variety of devices, it was probably a memory limitation. The lack of it doesn’t really diminish the overall effect. The longer you play, the more depressed you’ll feel, with or without voice acting.
Gameplay
This War of Mine: The Little Ones is an action adventure game with micro management and survival horror elements. If you start up the story mode your three refugees will be plonked in a building with a limited amount of resources. These resources are used for upgrading your house, feeding your survivors and keeping them healthy. As you gather more resources, you can upgrade the different aspects of your home. This is done during the daytime. During the night you can choose a destination to scavenge, which character should go for the run and what the other characters should do: either sleeping or guarding the homestead. Having a character on guard helps against looters which steal your stuff, making upgrading your home or feeding your friends difficult.
A good start is half the effort, is what is often said, but other things happen which mess up even the best made plans. No matter how well you’ve prepared, nothing stopped a mob from walking up to your door during the night and wounding the present refugees. So if you’ve traded your bandages away for food, you’ll be shit out of luck. Just as you think you’ve got things under control, something else comes along and messes things up. It feels like a constant struggle uphill, even if you do manage to keep your characters alive through depression, starvation and being nearly mortally wounded.
As you play more and more of the main story you’ll unlock different character pairs. You can select these in the ‘Try again’ part of the game. As there is no save states to choose from you’ll have to start up from day one with the characters. If you want to make your own story, you can do just that. You can choose out of a myriad of characters, even children, no, war doesn’t even spare the younger ones. The depressing tone of the game doesn’t even relent when it comes to the sensitive theme of children in wartimes. You then get to choose how long the conflict lasts, from twenty days, which might sound short, but is still pretty long to survive. If you really are a hardcore survival expert with a strong mental state, you can up the amount of days the conflict lasts up to eighty days.
The hardest part of the year is the winter, and even that is something you can change, the harshness, length and when it starts. There is no tutorial, which makes learning the ropes difficult. You’ll need a couple of playthroughs for you to get into the routine of what to do first and what are the important things to look out for. This might increase the difficulty level a lot, as you need to invest time to get something in return.
Conclusion
If you are looking for a difficult, depressing and claustrophobic action adventure game, This War of Mine: The Little Ones is just up your alley. Without a tutorial or save state, learning the ropes is difficult but every day your characters survive is a victory which is equally depressing in ambience as it is addictive.
This War Of Mine: The Little Ones - Review,
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