War Mongrels Review (ThDubya)
Pretty good. Pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Not as polished as the games from Mimimi or the classic Commandos/Desperados, but much more Polish.
Very bleak and brutal in its depiction of the war, handling the some of the worst aspects of the war, which is very uncommon in video games. I can hardly remember a single one that actively describes atrocities like this; most games step around it more or less gracefully. Seeing the horrific scenes gives a slightly uneasy feeling, but gives you an extra edge in completing the missions because of the emotional connection.
The story is coherent, which is not always the case in these kinds of games. The cutscenes between missions are very well done and have a unique art style.
The characters are unique and no single one feels overpowered although there are a couple who I tend to use a lot when I have them; but none that I hardy ever use.
The technical quality is OK. I have encountered a couple of weird bugs.
Once a building actually "moved" and was rendered in 3d at the wrong place, so it become a ghost house since I could move through its walls. A reload did not fix the issue but a restart of the game did.
There are some oddities sometimes with the save game system but I think most of it is just being unlucky on when the auto save triggers, which causes the next quickload to be in a bad situation. But you can manually select an older save and get out of the problem.
There is also an issue with picking stuff up, and I have seen others mention this as well. It is sometimes hard to select that you want to carry a dead body if there is also a throwable item and a weapon in nearly the same place.
Compared to the Mimimi games I also miss a more automatic crouch. I seem to recall that in those, if you crawl but then run, the character will enter crawl again when in position. But not here. So your characters need a little more "babysitting" in order to not be spotted.
But these are just minor issues. It is in no way an amateurish or indie-like game with bad controls or interfaces, just a few minor things that I miss from comparable games.
The length of the game is good. Not short but not so long as to get bored.
There is also some interesting tidbits of historical info to pick up and read as bonus items after completing missions. Some of it is very good, but I am sorry to say that some of it is very bad. Especially the "News periodical" segments "War Stores" are extremely boring and as many others have commented very subjective in its contents and thus I come to doubt much of what I hear in them. Some of the "modern" news articles are also extremely subjective in style and I dislike that they cross the fourth wall and directly speak to the player. But all this is optional side contents so if you dislike it, just don't watch it. The game is very good anyway.
In summary; strongly recommended for fans of the genre. Better than Partisans 1941, but slightly worse than Commandos/Desperados/Mimimi.