This War Of Mine is not the kind of game i have played before and if it wasn’t recommended by a friend or being live streamed by said friend i would probably not have bought it myself. Therefore i bought it not long after its release in November 2014 and have been putting quite a bit of time into it since then.

Having said that, This War Of Mine is honestly incredibly gripping and addictive! I found myself having played it 12 hours straight right after buying and installing it without realizing just how long i had been playing for. At the time of buying this the game basically started completely randomly every time you start over, meaning you started with different characters at different seasons in the year with different lengths of conflict each time. In one such scenario or story you would start with just one character in your bombed ruin of a shelter, in another you would start with two characters in winter so your characters were more susceptible to illness.

The basic concept of the game is to survive the war with whatever characters you start with. You can craft various worktables in order to make weapons or tools and to brew moonshine or grow herbs and tobacco to make medicines or cigarettes. You can also craft beds, chairs, heaters, a cooker etc, but in order to build these you can choose one character to scavenge at night. Of course this means that if you have only one character your shelter is likely to be raided at night and your items stolen. You can also be raided while one of your characters is at your shelter during the night but sometimes they will injure your characters to steal your items.

The random characteristics of this game can keep you gripped for hours without realizing it and the look and feel of the game are so fitting with the games setting. Since this game has released however the Developers have released quite a bit of content for it changing just how your characters stories will play out. Firstly instead of completely random stories that you could start with they implemented the ability for you to choose which story you play which means you can pick which characters you would then start with. This gives you a little more choice as to how difficult or easy you will find playing through the story but anything could still happen and your characters could still all become deeply depressed, starved or terminally ill, or worse murdered.

New Features / DLC

The developers have also released a DLC content for this game in which all proceeds go to the War Child Charity and you can choose how much you pay for this content – there are three prices all for the same content and it all goes to charity. This DLC content i believe added ‘Graffiti’ to the various locations that can be scavenged. The Graffiti are War Paintings and a little information about the paintings histories can be found on the main menu of the game when you first open the game from steam.

The Developers had also added at some point a new shelter that your characters can randomly start in, i don’t think there is a way of choosing which of the two shelters you start in but both i think have the same amount of rooms / space. Also there have been at least two new scavengeable locations added recently which add interesting new things to see and loot.

Lastly (as of writing) the developers had also added in a feature called Scenario Editor in which you can create your very own scenario or story. This allows you to control things such as the length of conflict, when winter comes, how long winter lasts and how severe the winter will be. You can choose how many characters you start out with and you can even choose to make a whole new character and upload an image of your choosing to use as its portrait. This means you can take a picture of yourself and play This War Of Mine as yourself!!

All in all this is a fantastic game with awesome developers who are continuously adding new free content and massively supporting their game and i can very highly recommend this game to pretty much anyone because it will honestly keep you playing for many many hours.