| Let me state right up front that I don’t really enjoy attacking a game or its creators. I realize that each effort is a work of art, a thing of beauty and a collection of considerable effort and toil. A lot of work went into The War Engine (TWE), and I appreciate that.
Second, I have to confess that I didn’t spend enough time on this game to really get into the details. Blame the Christmas rush, but there’s a stack of boxes demanding attention and I would peek over at them with incredible angst every time I pushed deeper into TWE.
And third, I may be guilty of reviewing TWE for what I wanted it to be, and not what it is. I am not currently a turn-based, miniature-painting war gamer type of guy. It’s definitely in my blood, and I’ve put a brush to a tiny face before. But I am not that enthralled with this particular sub-genre.
So Shrapnel Games and Boku and all the enthusiasts will have to take what I say here with a mighty large crystal of sodium chloride. Some players may get hooked entirely on this title. It has a lot going for it, as I’ll explain in a minute. But it never really won me over.
I thought the concept was incredible, brilliant, outstanding — I give it an enthusiastic bravo! By all means, let gamers have more chances to design their own worlds. The ability to freelance with TWE is considerable, and the intricacy and level of detail that a dedicated gamer can dive down to are fabulous. If you want to design your own game, here is your chance.
Still, I can’t help but grouse that the interface and the graphics are just not right. This feels like a game I would have played on a 286 way back in 1991, when hard drives and memory were prohibitively expensive. Icons and simplified landscapes were expected back then. You did the best with what you had. I guess I’ve just been "conditioned" to believe that more realism and better eye candy is better. Blame Nintendo and Microsoft, with their shiny new consoles out in the living room hooked up to my TV. Shame on me, but the eye candy and code bloat that has stretched games from a few floppies to a CD-ROM to a DVD has taken firm hold of my expectations.
Maybe I’ve just reviewed too many amazing RTS titles lately, and my standards are raised. If so, it is entirely possible that your mileage may vary. But it isn’t clear to me that this type of turn-based, prehistoric effort is anything but an evolutionary dead-end. You know how I knew it wasn’t going to be all that breath taking? When I saw that the CD-ROM only carried 192 MB of code. For seven games and an editor.
Without further ado, here are the seven pre-packaged scenarios you can manipulate on your own: - Armies of Armageddon: My turret against the enemy’s go karts. One hit and he was torched. Quite satisfying.
- Tour of Duty '44: My wrist was sore after 10 minutes. I couldn’t believe how much clicking I had to do before the first shot was fired in anger. It was so bad I was pleading for the computer to stop sending in reinforcements. Each man had to be coaxed through the obstacles on the beaches of Normandy, then piled up against a wall. I’d send them through a breach and they’d get slaughtered by a machine gun. On they slogged, yet still they died. Brutal, but lots of possibilities.
- The North Realm Saga: Move barbarians around a square at a time and take on other barbarians. There is a thud as rocks, arrows or fists are tossed, and the ring of steel is gratifying. The voice clips are not endearing at all — it sounds as though someone was in a small closet, swallowing the microphone, and they’re too long.
- Global Conflict: Move ships and units around, trying to mount a campaign.
- Paintball!: Probably my favorite game. The controls were a little simpler to pick up, there wasn’t as much clicking, and the game didn’t take long to get interesting. Sometimes I would click on a paintballer and he would mysteriously pivot the exact wrong way, and I never did figure out why. But this one had an excellent feel to it.
- TRL: A lot of clicking, moving dune buggies around. So-so.
- Warspace: A fairly straightforward affair. Your spaceship is trying to move freely through space, with chores to do such as land a shuttle on a moon or thread your way through a wormhole. But I longed for the ability to just camp on the accelerate button and fire away. Alas, the turn-based world frowns on such enthusiasm.
You can tinker and tweak each one, and really knock yourself out. Frankly, that’s what saves this title. Otherwise, the premise never changes. Here is the basic approach of each game:
Phase 1: Move your unit however many movement points you have.
Phase 2: Aim your weapons.
Phase 3: Fire your weapons and end your turn.
The good news is that you can’t easily skip any of your units. The bad news is that sometimes there are entirely too many units and you wish you could ignore them.
What I don’t like about these games is the following: - Simplistic graphics — most of this could be done with four colors it is so simple. The rest of the world is piling up polygons and killing themselves to create an immersive world. Not here.
- Entirely too much clicking — it can take hundreds of clicks to end a turn, and the League for the Prevention of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome will be up in arms.
- Not intuitive — I sometimes don’t have a clue what to do. High-school Web pages have better navigation schemes than these titles. Rollovers and tighter text boxes aren’t the only answer, either — an honest-to-God hint button is needed.
- There’s not much of a concept of sub-leaders here. Each man, in turn, must be touched. Please let me group. Please! Giving the same command string, over and over and over, is a waste of time and not good gaming. It’s why RTS games are so popular.
- No zooming. I’d really like to be able to get a close-up of units. They’re too abstract. But then they’re not much to look at up close, sometimes. When other titles are laboriously cranking out exact replicas of Panzers and Sherman tanks, I’m getting icons.
Other than a desperate plea for someone else to step up and help with reviewing these turn-based war games, let me say emphatically that I do applaud the efforts of the developers. It’s a kick playing your own game. It’s addictive. You could get lost for days making a game to your own liking, getting it just right. All the tools are there to create a simple, yet satisfying scenario of your own.
Keep in mind, however, that you won’t necessarily be moving the artistic ball too far down the gaming field. No real advances in the science of gaming are likely to be produced using these tools. I finally figured it out by turning to my copy of Game Design Secrets of the Sages, published in 1999 by Brady Games. It’s an epic book, edited by Marc Saltzman with comments from notables such as Sigeru Miyamoto (Nintendo/Mario), Sid Meier (Civilization, Gettysburg), Cliff Bleszinski (Epic/Unreal) and Alexey Pajitnov (creator of Tetris). They talk about things like game play, fun factors, and the sense of mystery. And that’s where I hit it — there’s not much of a sense of mystery to these games. Either you have the units and the hit points, or you don’t.
Yet I am giving this game a pretty good score — 8 out of 10. I don’t know how it could ever get better without supplying TWE II on about six CD-ROMs. But it’s not that bad. So even while I complain about various aspects, I respect the title and encourage more improvements.
I’ve got to go now; I’m thinking about trying to duplicate the movie Black Hawk Down. I believe that with TWE I can build a few city squares, give a handful of good Marines, a ton of firepower and let them take on hordes of angry Somalis armed with rocks. Wish me luck… | 
