Indie Corner: Crush Your Enemies

Barbarians Brimming with Bloodlust

Crush Your Enemies is an RTS game developed by Gambitious in the style of Mushroom Wars and Boid. It is a simple game, originally released on mobile devices as a downloadable app. Now, it has been released on Steam, but is it worthy of playing with the big boys?

Before reviewing this game, I would like to say that this is in no way a comparison with the other two games I have recently reviewed. However, since they are so similar, I will focus on the same aspects that can be found in these two other games.  Crush Your Enemies distinguishes itself from plenty of other similar games in the areas of graphics and humour, but it employs very similar mechanics as other games, but with a twist.

Starting off with graphics, Crush Your Enemies has a lovely retro-feel to it. The entire game is 2D, and is similar to the graphics of Warcraft II, though slightly more detailed. The narrative is brought by means of dialogue between characters, and the design of these characters is not only quite cartoony in nature, but also beautifully executed. The visual style of the game, both during the game itself as during cutscenes, is one of the better aspects of Crush Your Enemies. The next very positive addition to this game is the humour.

In Crush Your Enemies, you play as the son of a raging, notorious barbarian. His father wants nothing more than his son becoming at least as famous and brutal as his old man, but sadly the son is a fat, incompetent buffoon. The whole campaign revolves around the father teaching the son how to ‘crush his enemies’. Do I hear the words ‘natural in-game tutorial’? Step by step, the son, and therefore the player, is taught how to tackle the basic mechanics of the game. This all happens in a very light atmosphere, with plenty of (meta)-humour. Sadly, most of the jokes are linked to mobile phones, which feels a bit weird since I played the game on PC. This, of course, is a direct result of a simple ‘port’ between mobile devices and other gaming systems. Still, the dialogue is very enjoyable and quite funny. The sound effects that are used when the characters are ‘speaking’ to each other are very annoying, though, as the same ‘mumbling’ sound is used over and over again.

On to the mechanics of the game. Crush Your Enemies plays like a classic fast-paced RTS game, where the focus is on swift decisions and overpowering your enemies. The player starts with a spawn point in the form of a house or village. The more units that are in that spawn point, the more extra units will spawn. I suppose this symbolizes the barbarians fornicating like fowl. Pretty funny! Next, the units need to be sent out to other spawn points in order to capture them. When you do not upgrade your basic soldiers to other unit types, it’s a simple numerical equation. When you have more units than your enemy, you take over the spawn point, and vice versa. However, upgrading your basic units to more specialised units might result in a victory, although you have fewer units than your enemy. I refer to this as the rock/paper/scissors-principle. All units have their counterpart unit that they are either weaker or stronger to.

So far, the game mechanics seem very similar to other games of the same genre, but Crush Your Enemies adds one very ingenious mechanic to it: in order to claim the spawn point of your enemy, you must first conquer the road that leads to it, which takes time. This is visually represented as the board changing to the colour of your team, which shows the dominance of the player or the enemy. This means that although you might not have as much spawn points as the enemy, you might still have time to prepare to defend, as the enemy also needs to conquer land before you can be attacked. Added to that is a very interesting dynamic: do you conquer land to establish a defensive perimeter, or do you focus on having more units? Alternatively, you can also choose to take a longer route to the enemy, which takes up less time if you have already conquered that route. In summary, this game works with two balance scales, the first one focuses on the amount and the type of units you have, the second one on the dominance of the map.

Crush Your Enemies is very similar to other games of the same genre, but distinguishes itself by adding an extra game mechanics that allows the player to employ a variety of strategies within the same level. It also has a very unique visual style, and the (meta-)humour is amusing and sometimes very funny. Sadly, this is still a direct port from mobile devices to other gaming systems, and the sound effects are often very basic, and sometimes even downright annoying.

Score 4 out of 5: