War Theatre is a turn-based strategy RPG that puts you in the role of one of seven different commanders each with their own unique abilities to give you an edge over your opponent. A very interesting looking game on the surface with a crazy art style and a few unique gameplay game modes that keep the game fresh and interesting.
- The heroes: The game provides you with a set of campaigns each focused on their respective commander and their traits. These range from buffing your foes, or debuffing your enemies, to spreading toxic gas across the map that kills anything that comes in its path. Thanks to these traits each and every playthrough are unique.
- Game modes: War theatre offers a plethora of different game modes that each give their unique spin on the base game, offering unique objectives with each game mode that you play. These include but are not limited to conquer, and assassination both of which are similar, sure, but fun nonetheless.
- Audio: The sound of the ground rumbling when a large enemy attacks you or the extremely loud blast of a tank cannon shooting its payload towards you is absolutely menacing, and I freaking love that. With me being an absolute audiophile and loving everything from music to plainly listening to audio clips of the most random things (not ASMR… That stuff is just plain creepy) they’ve absolutely hit they’ve absolutely nailed this.
- Character Design: With a steampunk / post-apocalyptic vibe that this game is trying to offer, you need good visuals and character design to come along with it. With the creepy and odd looking character design, they’ve gone with it is extremely nice! Whilst I find some of the animations to be a little bit too short and lackluster I think the graphics and character design is absolutely amazing, something to be proud of even, with each and every unit/commander being and looking very unique from one another.
- Campaigns: There are seven campaigns currently in the game as of writing this review, each putting you in the skin of one of the seven commanders that each have their own story and traits, however the stories are so vague and offer very little to no detail or backstory as to why the war broke out and as to why they’re fighting in the first place. Whilst this might not be as important for a game like this to actually have a storyline, I think their attempt at writing one was mediocre at best.
- Maps: The amount of maps in the game is pretty incredible with there being over 25-30 or even more. I’d say they’ve done pretty well at the quantity department, now the quality department however not as much, sadly. The color palette within the game is very bland and washed out making the maps look very boring. The top-down view angle that the game offers you does not help as it only points of the lack of detail and thought they’ve put into the maps. I honestly think they rushed them.
- Perks: The game offers a set of perks that generally make your life a lot easier and helps defeat your enemies however these perks are rather hard to get, extremely bland and generic once more, sadly you need these perks regardless if you like them or not. Without them, the enemy will violently beat you back to the stone age, and believe me after spending about 35-50 minutes in a single level only to be beaten and have to try it all over again. Yeah, no thanks.
- Tutorial… or the lack off: when starting of your first game the game briefly explains the controls and the premise of the game, and after that you’re left to figure out everything else by yourself, this is absolutely horrendous at times due to the fact that some of the user interface elements are very obnoxious and litter the screen with unnecessary clutter.
- AI: Oh my lord, I’m still trying to figure out if I’m just really, really bad, or if the AI is incredibly intelligent and hard to beat. Especially at the later levels in each campaign, the AI becomes absolutely brutal and relentless, to the point where it’s not even fun repeating the same level over and over.
Conclusion
Score: 65%
War Theatre has more positive things about it than negative. Considering the game is pretty challenging, and decently long, It’s pretty fun and interesting to play. There’s a variety of things to do, and you get lots of hours out of the game. If you don’t mind replaying some levels, and grinding your way through.
Developer: Arcade Distillery Publisher: Arcade Distillery
Played on: PC Also available on: Nintendo Switch / Playstation Vita / PS4
Time to beat: 10-15 hrs
Steam Game Store link: click here
