S&S Indie Review: Absolute War

S&S Reviews- Absolute War-By Gnol Wehttam Inc.

XBLIG- Justin Foster

Released 7/9/12

80ms points

Rating Based on Community   Violence 1/3   Sex 0/3    Mature Content 0/3

         

 Hello everyone, I hope everyone stateside had a good Fourth of July.  This week I dove into a pretty challenging game called Absolute War.  When I say challenging I do mean it in an entertaining way.  I don’t want to scare anyone off before I get to explain this game.  Let’s start by getting some basics out of the way.  This game is a strategy game.  It is classified as a shooter, but it’s about position and unit composition more than actually shooting.  Let me also be clear that the controls are not something you’re going to be familiar with.  It is going to take a good hour before the controls can be handled without hesitation.  That being said, the time you put into learning the game will reflect how fun the game will be.

See All the Bad Guys

   The game is a face-off between two factions.  You can play as humans, robots, and aliens, each with their own advantages. The goal for the player is to position your troops in a fashion that they can defeat an onslaught of enemies who throw themselves at you.  You can place solider behind cover, up in sniper towers, or you can move them around to get the most strategic position.  In addition you have different types of soldiers that have their own abilities. You fight enemies in waves and in between waves you can adjust where your soldiers sit or ensure that they have upgraded equipment. Using the store tab you can buy new units (tanks), ammo, and new weapons to make sure you are ready for the next wave. The actual waves themselves require a lot of strategy because you are clearly put at a disadvantage.  You have a handful of soldiers while the enemy keeps gaining and gaining soldiers.  The gameplay can seem very confusing at first and you’re going to need a good amount of training to understand what the heck is going on.  Good thing our developer realized that there were a lot of elements to his game.  There is a very detailed tutorial that guides you from spawning your soldiers to using the store to upgrade them all.  This is where I will caution everyone again.  If you try to ignore the tutorial or skim through it, you’re going to wonder why the game seems so impossibly difficult.  The game is fun and demanding if you know what you’re doing.  The game also features different difficulties so while you’re learning to play, the easy difficulty will be much appreciated.  There is also a leaderboard system to check how each game compares against your last attempt.  The game is impressive because of all it crams into a 80ms game.  The amount of enemies on screen is ridiculous, a store tab, different units and environments.  Something I wouldn’t have expected from an Indie game is map editor.  Indie games come to impress me more and more each day and the map editor in this game is one of the features I like to see.  It can be really fun to make a map that gives the player a huge advantage and see how long it takes the enemy to destroy you.  You can make very unfair maps and that’s ok because it’s fun to get really far in the game and have all your work actually pay off.

  Absolute War is a game I have spent a good amount of time playing and probably will continue to do so because of its incredibly high replay value.  This is one of those games where I have friends walk by and see me playing and they decide to come over to try and come up with better ways to position my soldiers.  The game crams a lot of content in a tiny package, but I don’t think the game would be as good as it is without all its features.   It’s a game that is challenging and can have the map rearranged so it never gets old.  This is a great Indie game for people who can sit down for a while and learn to play something new.  It is good because of how it makes you think and how the game can be played differently every time.  This game is not for someone who wants to jump into a game and expect to have a good time right away.  That will skew the success of the game, but the game itself is spectacular I hope to see more from Gnol Wehttam in the future.

S&S Rating:9/10

Email:Soulo316@yahoo.com