Five hours with… War for the Overworld
The five hours with… series focuses on games that have been out for a while, and have recently received major updates. The idea is to help sort games that have become significantly better and worth playing from those that have not improved.
War for the Overworld has been steadily worked on by its developer since release, and much to their credit they have stayed in communication with the community releasing frequent updates and bug patches.
After spending five hours though with the current public release build, the game remains sadly lacking. A few missing features and a slow campaign sabotage what is a mechanically great game.
At its core, War for the Overworld is a game deeply inspired by Dungeon Keeper. You build a one level underground base that attracts minions and fight off good guys who come to steal your gold and break your stuff. Sometimes you have to go break their stuff in their adjacent underground lair. Think the bastard child of SImCity and Starcraft 2.
The first hour of this is extremely fun as you learn the basic mechanics of how to build a base and set traps. You summon minions, build rooms for your underground lair, and throw big ol’ minion hoedowns where you break the good guys stuff. This feels extremely rewarding and my head swam with the possible traps and creature warrens I’d be shortly building. Problems creep in quickly as the resource requirements become opaque and base building begins to feel very hit or miss. A good example of this is the Slaughterpen, which provides food for your minions. However, there is no way to tell how large a Slaughterpen you need, or if you have a large enough one, or if you should consider expanding it. It never seemed to be causing any issues with my minions so I think I built my pens large enough, but I never had any feedback to let me know one way or the other. Considering the Slaughterpen is needed to feed all of your minions, this lack of clarity bothered me throughout my play time. In short, I found it extremely difficult to identify inefficiencies in my base, something I yearned to know.
The campaign moves incredibly slowly- I don’t think that was due to my play style as I’m extremely aggressive in real time strategy games (to an easily exploitable fault) and found that each mission seemed to take around an hour. While that would be fine for later levels, you have an extremely limited set of traps and units at your command in the early levels, making it a war of attrition with your enemies rather than strategy. As I started the most recent level, I found a sense of hopelessness pervading as I looked at the measly number of unlocks and wondered how long it would take to unlock everything in the campaign.
I want to love this game and I admire the developers continued dedication to improving it, but after 5 hours with it I’m bored and frustrated by the lack of detailed information given to the player. This game is so clearly a labor of love done by passionate people who have continually updated it, but that can’t save it from mediocrity.
Originally published at www.thebusygamer.com.
