This War of Mine: Complete Edition

27.11.2018

Critic 80/100

Users 70/100

Genre: Simulator Strategy Adventure Indie

In This War Of Mine you do not play as an elite soldier, rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city; struggling with lack of food, medicine and constant danger from snipers and hostile scavengers. The game provides an experience of war seen from an entirely new angle. The pace of This War of Mine is imposed by the day and night cycle. During the day snipers outside stop you from leaving your refuge, so you need to focus on maintaining your hideout: crafting, trading and taking care of your survivors. At night, take one of your civilians on a mission to scavenge through a set of unique locations for items that will help you stay alive. Make life-and-death decisions driven by your conscience. Try to protect everybody from your shelter or sacrifice some of them for longer-term survival. During war, there are no good or bad decisions; there is only survival. The sooner you realize that, the better.

This War of Mine turns the lens of the war game away from the front line and onto the ordinary people caught in its wake. Inspired by real sieges such as the blockade of Sarajevo, the game places the player in charge of a small group of civilian survivors sheltering inside a battered, half-ruined house in the besieged fictional city of Pogoren, in the war-torn nation of Graznavia. Most of these survivors are not soldiers but everyday people with no combat training or survival expertise, and keeping them alive falls entirely on the player's shoulders. The struggle plays out in a grim daily rhythm: by day, snipers make the streets deadly, so the group huddles indoors to craft tools, cook, trade, and tend to their health and morale, while by night they venture out to scavenge scarce supplies from the ravaged city. Survival demands hard moral choices, weighing compassion against desperation as the group endures the long wait for a distant ceasefire.