izigame.me

I actually gave this game a second shake after my first playthrough of 4 hours. I got to level 9 out of 12 before giving up again because the experience doesn't improve any longer the game goes on.
So let's get cracking with the detail.
War Mongrels is a real-time stealth game in the same vein of Commandos, Shadow Tactics etc that tries to reinvent the wheel but forgets that the wheel shape it's wanting to use is a triangle with a side missing because it's bugged out. Apparently your battle is against Nazi Germany, but what they don't tell you is the 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. You can't change direction quickly, amd your characters take a full second and a half to swing around beforehand. Standing up, going prone, or anything that doesn't involve shooting. The double click buffer is also so lax if you want to change direction the game 9/10 times will interpret this as a sprint command and charge you head first into wherever you clicked. Since 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 just trying to sneak up on.
- Action queuing is a mess. Simple things like crawling to an enemy before stabbing require you to get in place, then manually stand up, maybe even get another step closer for some reason before they actually do it. Literally no other real-time stealth game I've played works like this and it's just feels awful. You can't time anything properly because of these buffers. There's also some weird delay after confirming an action and wanting to trigger the next. If you try and do the second action too quickly whilst the first is playing out, it gets completely ignored. You're then left scrambling to get the action out with the already wonky input reading.
- Sometimes actions simply just won't do what you asked of them. Especially when you want to run over to your enemy or objective before the action, say, a stab kill. Instead you just beeline up to their face and freeze in place nose-to-nose while you decide how you're going to handle the incoming shit-show (likely via a quickload).
- The "tactical mode" that lets you queue actions for multiple characters at once surprise surprise, also doesn't work. An example; I had two enemies stood next to each other with a door adjacent. I queue up the commands for my two guys to walk up and stab one unit each. Simple right? I kid you not, one of them instead chose to walk over to the door, OPEN THE DOOR, THEN TURN AROUND, AND THEN KNIFE THE ENEMY I ASKED HIM TO DEAL WITH??? How can such a simple system bug out so fantastically???
- Autopathing is complete garbage. You can't click the top of a vine or 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 bumbling straight into an enemies FOV.
- Character ability distribution is a mess. One character (Lukas) has a bear trap much like Yuki from Shadow Tactics, Hector from Desperados etc. But the lure/whistle ability is given to someone else (Manfred). So now the trap is basically unusable since you'll 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, Manfred has a pocket watch he can use as a lure but is completely redundant because his whistle ability has 3 times the range and works through walls so the watch literally has no purpose. Other abilities are also simply different for the sake of being different such as Rubble's firecrackers which are the same as Manfred's whistle except it has absolutely zero range and is a timed detonation for some bizarre reason, making it a cumbersome "lure" that is harder to use than it should be.
- You also have two spy party members that can use disguises to get around patrols and/or officers. However the devs forgot to add vision priorities when these are being used. For example, normally when prone enemies can't see you in there outer FOV. However if you have a disguise on and do the same they can still see you because they've overridden the condition of "being in disguise" over "being prone". Basically it means having a disguise can be worse than not having one at all, amazing! You can tell the character abilities were mapped for the sake of individual missions and not as an overall team so certain things are completely useless and others your only viable choice.
- "Combat Mode" is a new addition that lets you to holster your weapon and point and click whilst being able to move at the same time. A nice idea in theory, but it's just bad. You can only control one person at a time which is useless for the larger scale firefights a mechanic like this is trying to encourage. 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 they just dismount and make a beeline towards whatever it was you were trying to shoot. Why is this even a needed condition to operate a turret? And why isn't it even explained to you?
- The AI has the intelligence of an unbaked potato. Their detection mechanics simply don't work. If you have full concealment cover like hiding in a manhole or cupboard you can do whatever the hell you want. I 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 while his comrades all stood close by or next to him act like nothing's happening. Scheisse boi eventually calms down and resumes his patrol back to normal, mo alarms, no reinforcements, no consequences. There's legit 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 anyway.
- Earlier builds were absolutely plagued with bugs, and while I only had a couple they were enough to show the game up for the spaghetti coded mess that it is. I had enemies being able to see me kill other units through walls and while they had their backs turned to me. Textures glitching out frequently. Another banger was where I had the foresight to clear out all the enemies in a courtyard whilst making my way through the map, but the objective later is to "kill soldiers" in that area, so now I can't complete that objective? Great design when your modus operandi is to mow down everything in sight with your "combat mode" inspired crap.
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. Do NOT buy.