This War of Mine is a deeply harrowing, moving, and complex game that tells a brutally truthful tale of citizens of a fictional country embroiled and surviving in a war torn land.
11 Bit Studio’s rather iconic title This War of Mine released its definitive ‘Final Cut’. The game about citizens caught up in the middle of a horrifying war features some of the most frighteningly honest takes on what war really is like, especially for this caught in the crossfire.
The game features numerous ways to play as you can either begin in the ‘Classic’ mode that sees you playing as either preset characters or creating your own and surviving for a set amount of days until ‘The Ceasefire’. Or players can embroil themselves in ‘Stories’. Three preset narratives that 11 Bit created in this horrifying world. The stories feature way more of a more natural narrative focus, with the characters having a little more depth and nuance as opposed to the characters you could create yourself.
A Major Warning for this title. This game is graphic. Well and truly it was one of the most unapologetically honest games I have ever played. Children are present in the war torn world and are caught up in horrifying distress. The game features many moral grey areas and is overall an emotionally taxing game to play. If you wanna play a game exclusively for fun, this game might not be the one.
The game is harrowing and complicated emotionally to experience and while the experience is worth it, it will be taxing for all players.
With that out of the way, let’s start with the gameplay
The gameplay of This War of Mine: Final Cut is very similar to many other survival games. Players must craft items to survive all the while scavenging anything from food, supplies, and medicine to combat the many problems your survivors may be facing.
The controls on PlayStation 5 are very clunky, especially when moving between floors. Your characters will very often run down the stairs when you don’t want them to, turn corners, leave buildings and charge through doors all while you are trying to get used to the movement and controls. This problem is made even worse when moving between floors could require complex and long animations leading to you being locked in an animation you didn’t want to do.
The crafting menu is decent and tells players all the information needed. The number of crafting stations is at the perfect amount where it is not quite overwhelming for the player and each crafting station has it’s own benefits and considering the finite amount of days in This War of Mine choosing what crafting station you choose will dictate your playstyle and where you go.
Scavenging is probably the ‘most fun’ part of the game if I could trivialise it in such a way. Scouring ruins for meds and food is very addictive, especially when back at your home base you have a personal connection to almost driving the idea home. Scavenging can be made easier by crafting, it creates a nice gameplay loop to keep you engaged and also, strangely enough, provides you with enough focus and drive to keep playing.
Before you head out to scavenge you need to prepare and choosing what to take and what not to take dictates what your mission will be. You could take items to trade but be face to face with evil men. Or you could take a rifle to a house where an old man and his sick wife live, they can’t fight you, but you have nothing to trade, what do you do? Your decisions have such a wide arching emotional impact that is incredibly brutal and encapsulates the heart of This War of Mine.
Combat wise the game is clunky and slow. If it’s stealth, you normally are just pressing X to hide in the shadows, then pressing X to stab someone. When it comes to taking cover and firing weapons, it becomes even more tedious and is without a doubt the worst aspect of This War of Mine: Final Cut.
In conjunction with the combat is stealth. The stealth is very clunky as it is depending on the movement on your sticks. This wouldn’t be much of a problem, but they are so sensitive that the slightest movement causes your character to barge through doors like a madman making stealth way more of a chore than it really needed to be.
Worst of all, This War of Mine lacks any kind of useful tutorial. Players are forced to just kind of figure things out during their playing time, which would be fine to some degree, if some of the mechanics were not clunky and overly complicated, especially on a controller.
Graphically the game is very good. The aesthetics of crumbling buildings and intense rainfall, combined with the dull sad greys that mark the world truly immerses you in the environment and enhances the game to the next level. I will say that on occasion I did run into some visual glitches, they were few and far between but still present.
The best part of This War of Mine: Final Cut in my opinion is the ‘story’. Whether that is the stories that 11 Bit wrote for players to experience or the sort of emerging narrative that occurs in the ‘classic’ mode. The story and atmosphere in the game is incredible. It’s dark, honest, and morally grey.
Scavenging from a school full of homeless people, begging you not to take their stuff. Taking medication from a woman who is seriously ill, all so you can save your child is a very difficult and harrowing thing and This War of Mine captures this brilliantly.
The dialogue can on sometimes be poorly written leading to some of the emotional beats not quite landing as well, but regardless, the game contains some of the most harrowing sights I have seen in any game. The written stories also do suffer from linearity, which is to be expected, but it does remove that freedom that makes This War of Mine so consistently engaging.
Overall, This War of Mine is a clunky yet harrowing and emotional survival game that will challenge you ethically and in terms of the game’s difficulty. It is unyielding in its honesty, portraying some of the most horrific aspects of war and conflict with brutality and all of the horrifying sights. It is a fantastic lens into a terrifying world.
This War of Mine: Final Cut is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. Here at GamesCreed, we cover everything gaming. From the latest news to stellar reviews, GamesCreed has you covered
