Review: Rover Wars |

Sakari Games is a Belgian game development studio that has been around for over 10 years. Their latest release, Rover Wars, is supposed to be a ‘baby between a MOBA and an RTS game’ available both on Steam (PC) and Nintendo Switch. This normally isn’t my kind of game, but as you’ll read in this review, Rover Wars surprised me in the best way. Let’s see how they managed that!

What we liked!

Gameplay: The gameplay is quite straightforward: you move, you attack and you plant various types of factories (producing minions that’ll do your bidding). Your goal is to destroy the home base of your opponent. Do this and you win. There your typical campaign, which will gradually become more difficult. There is also a second option: battle mode. This is a game you can tailor to your own taste. You choose between 17 maps and you can adjust several settings like the speed of the game and the difficulty of the AIs.
Short: Depending on the difficulty and amount of players (plus of course, on how good you are at playing these types of games), a game will last between 5 and 10 minutes. The campaign mode will keep you busy for about 2 hours. A game being short can either be a good or a bad thing. In Rover Wars, it’s only adding value to the game. The short matches are perfect for playing with friends or for when you just want to play a strategic game without having to think too much. You learn quickly (there really isn’t much to learn, the game is quite simple), and just start playing.
Multiplayer: There’s a local and online multiplayer possibility. In local multiplayer mode, you can play with up to 7 friends. The online play goes through Steam Remote Play. Especially the local mode is interesting since this is a good game to play with your friends without having to explain too much. Besides the controls (as you’ll read below), the game is pretty intuitive and simple.

Somewhere between

Nada: Nothing, nada. My experience with this game was overall very positive, except for one key element, which you’ll read below in the ‘disliked’ section.

What we disliked

Controls: I had some trouble getting used to the controls since they were weirdly mapped. On a keyboard, the typical WASD combination was for moving. However, shooting was done by clicking the down arrow button. Weird right? It felt so counter-intuitive! Of course, after a while, you get the hang of it, but I honestly don’t understand why the developers chose to map controls this way.

Initially, Rover Wars didn’t really catch my attention. Then, when playing for the first time, the counter-intuitive controls threw me off balance. Not a good start, huh? However, once you get the hang of them, you quickly start enjoying this beautiful game. I didn’t expect it, but I got sucked into the strategic and fast-paced gameplay. Well done, Sakari Games.