War Mongrels Review (icefchunia)
Writing this review from the perspective of a longtime stealth real time tactics fan.
Overall the game left a good impression - well executed gameplay, thought-provoking story (that's a first for RTT games!), memorable characters and interesting scenarios. Pretty much all you could ask for in a commandos/desperados-like game. While not quite as polished as genre-defining Desperados 3/Shadow Tactics, the game was very worthy of my time, and a definite recommendation for all fans of the genre.
The good:
- Story. War Mongrels uniquely puts a very large emphasis on the narrative/worldbuilding. From faded aesthetics of the majority of the levels, to story cinematics bridging the narrative between levels, to a lot of additional historical context (war chronicle videos concerning the larger context of the events, newspaper articles, propaganda posters), it is clear the developers were very passionate about the story they wanted to tell and the events they wanted to highlight. The story works from the perspective of the tragedy the characters went through and succeeds in highlighting the horror of the eastern front of WW2.
- Gameplay. While very formulaic (i.e. identical to Shadow Tactics), the gameplay is well executed: levels are varied and interesting, characters are distinct and unique, there are multiple approaches to every situation, etc. There are no real gameplay innovations, but what is there is well done.
- Performance. The game looks and runs great.
The bad:
- Difficulty. I may be biased (I've spent hundreds of hours on similar games, doing all the challenges), but the game felt rather easy. Some ability combinations felt overpowered (disguise + whistle on one character), the areas were never quite as packed with enemies as in ST/D3, enemy variety was lacking. It was usually very obvious which character you were meant to use by unique traversal abilities. As a result the game was fun, but seldom difficult.
- Challenge Design. The game introduces a separate difficulty, unlockable after completing a mission once, with mission-specific challenges (win without using X, win within time limit, complete a specific task etc.), with a caveat - you can't save during the mission, only autosaves at checkpoints are enabled. This design decision, coupled with actually tying to complete challenges leads to a very bad experience - doing something new requires experimentation (and multiple failures in process), which then leads to having to play through whole 10+ minutes sequences of gameplay to make another attempt at a specific situation, over and over again. Thus the difficulty resides not in solving the puzzle, but in prolonged sequences of perfect mechanical execution. As a weird consequence, this makes speedrun challenges easy - timer resets upon loading a checkpoint, and by the time you power through mechanical execution of the route, you usually do it close to perfect timing-wise.
Minor nitpicks:
- Characters were hard to spot and visually too similar. I understand it was a stylistic choice, but similar look of characters and lack of color/theming made it difficult to spot and distinguish them at a glance.
- Bugs. I've encountered only a few, but on an off chance a developer reads this, I'll list them here:
1) Mission 3 - on challenge difficulty, in the middle of the level an in-game cutscene is played, describing presence of a high-value target on the location. After the cutscene, Lucas is sometimes placed directly in line-of-sight of an enemy, requiring a reset. Can be worked around by triggering the cutscene while said enemy looks away and immediately hiding, but the whole situation seems unintended.
2) Mission 10 - Lead was unable to use some of the highlighted ledges, while he should be able to (he ran up to them and stopped). The ledges provided access to ammo specific to him, so it was definitely a bug.
Thanks for reading, hope the review was useful.