Game:

War in the East 2 (2021)

Category:

Review

Duration: 1:04:23

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37

I review this after about 100 hours of play, basically 1 hour in casual game time!

The game is wonderfully complex, and demands the player to pay attention and invest in it in order to get the full sum of enjoyment from the experience. It covers weather, it's impact on combat, it's impacts on supply, supplies impact on combat, combats effects on combat, combats......

The game ties dozens of different mechanics, consequences and counter consequences together to form this vast dance of mechanical complexity that is easy for newer players to drown in, and when trying to learn the ropes are further slapped by the 300 ish page bible called the "Manual", it can quickly scare new players away from touching it. However, plaers who persist, go to bed reading the "Manual", and are willing to spend hours losing without knowing why eventually come to grips with the game's many systems and begin to gradually starting manipulating and nudging these systems to their favor.


Coupled with the mass of input options, commands, settings and stages to achieves basic things like simply resupplying can make the game overwhelmingly frustrating but also astonishingly rewarding once understood.

The depth, historical research and scale of the information the developer has gone into making the game also is something to be noted; it isn't a pretty game, but it a game where you can tell effort has been made to create something realistic, historically literate and sophisticated.

It's a game that demands respect and does not care if you like it or not, if it's "too difficult", it is unapologetic and simply goes "take it or leave it", and if your willing to take it, it'll drip feed you that gamer meth of learning, applying and succeeding we all love in the RTS genre.

Equally, once you know the "basics" you can muddle your way through the game without truly mastering it, meaning that it has oodles of replayability, and although initially overwhelming, with some effort can be understood.

Finally, the Ai and nature of the gameplay means that the game will always hold some degree of challenge, adding to it's already great levels of replayability.

A solid 8.5/10: A game unlike any other, that strategy gamers moving up in maturity will love and lose their social lives to, but not for the faint of heart or those wanting a more casual "day off work lets play" experience. The only issues is that it can be a bit of busy work clicking to death, and the game could honestly hand hold you just a bit more to stop your hours of game time going to waste.

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