izigame.me

Tries to reinvent the wheel, but uses a triangle shaped one with a side missing because it went and bugged out.

War Mongrels is a real-time stealth game in the same mould as Commandos and others alike. This take on the genre attempts to branch out more with it's mechanics to give a more action oriented experience but completely flops it while messing up on the stealth aspect too. Your battle is against Nazi Germany, but really your war is against some of the most dog-water, clunky, unintuitive and downright buggy controls I've ever had the misfortune to experience in a game of this type.
- Every character has lead feet. It takes a full second and a half to swing around when changing direction. That includes standing up, going prone, performing an action, or anything that doesn't involve shooting. The double click buffer is so lax so if you want to change direction quickly the game instead interprets it as a sprint command and charges you head first to wherever you clicked. As the lead feet also have an obscene noise detection radius you've got a perfect storm for being seen or heard by whatever you were trying to get past or sneak up on.
- Action queuing is a mess. Simple things like crawling up to an enemy before attacking require you to get in place, stand up, and maybe get another step closer too before they actually do it. No other real-time stealth game I've played is this cumbersome and it's awful trying to time your actions in sync with enemy vision. There's a weird delay when performing an action and wanting to trigger the next. If you try and do the second action too quickly whilst the first is still playing, it gets completely ignored.
- Sometimes actions simply just won't do what you asked, especially when use running to make them get their quicker. Instead you just beeline up to location and freeze, so if it's an enemy you're now nose-to-nose deciding how you're going to handle the incoming shit-show (likely via a quickload).
- The "planning mode" that lets you perform one action per member in one go surprise surprise, doesn't work. I had two enemies stood next to each other with a door adjacent. I queue my two guys to walk up and stab one enemy each. I kid you not, one of them instead chose to walk over to the door, OPEN THE DOOR, THEN TURN AROUND, AND ONLY THEN KNIFE THE ENEMY I ASKED HIM TO DEAL WITH AFTER BEING SEEN??? How can such a simple system bug out so fantastically???
- Autopathing is garbage. You can't click the top of a ladder to automatically climb it. They will either do nothing, or start going around the map perimeter trying to find "another" way and likely run into a random patrol. I've never had to babysit a unit so much to get around a simple corner without them bumbling straight into an enemies FOV.
- Character ability distribution is a mess. One character has a bear trap like Yuki from Shadow Tactics, Hector from Desperados etc, but the lure/whistle ability is given to someone else. The trap is now basically useless as you can only get to use it on patrolling unit paths that don't have a vision overlap with others (I didn't find an occasion even once in 8 missions). On top of that, that same guy with the whistle ability has a pocket watch he can use as a lure but is also useless because his whistle ability has 3 times the range and works through walls anyway. Other identical abilities have pointless extras such as timed activations or being consumable for seemingly no reason other than artificial variety.
- You have two party members that can use disguises to get around, but their usage is bugged. Normally when prone enemies can't see you in their outer FOV. If you have a disguise on however and go prone they can now still see you because they've overridden the condition of "being in disguise" over "being prone". Now it means having a disguise can be worse than not having one at all, amazing!
- "Combat Mode" is a new addition that lets you move around whilst firing weapons at the same time. A nice idea in theory, but it's badly executed. You can only control one person at a time in this mode which is useless for the larger scale firefights a mechanic like this encourages. It's also needed to use certain things like turrets but the game never explains that to you, so you hop on a turret and left click and to shoot they just dismount and run off towards whatever you were trying to shoot.
- The AI has the intelligence of an unbaked potato. If you have full concealment cover like hiding in a manhole or cupboard you can do whatever the hell you want. You can kill an enemy, leave his body in plain sight and the person finding him will freak out running around in circles yelling "scheisse" for a bit, all while his comrades stood close by or next to him act like nothing's happening. Scheisse Boi soon calms down and resumes his patrol back to normal, no alarms, no reinforcements, no consequences. There's nothing stopping you from just rinsing this strategy until the whole map is cleared out. Once I decided to use this approach over conventional stealth the gameplay became completely trivial. Enemies take about 4 years to aim and shoot in combat situations too so it's far too easy to just pick stragglers off one by one without being gunned down as well.
- Earlier builds were plagued with bugs, and I only had a couple but they were enough. I had enemies being able to see me kill others while backturned and blocked by a wall. Countless glitched textures, and mission objectives that wouldn't complete because I had the foresight to clear out an area of guards that requires you to kill them in a later part of the same mission. Real clever design.
This is without a doubt the worst real-time "stealth" game I've ever played and I wish I hadn't gone back to try and make something out of this mess, lest write this essay of all it's faults. Save your money.