Shadows of War Reviews

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"Shadows of War" is an ancient game from 2014. It's a whopping 11 years old at the time of this review. The game lacks support for the typical features of modern gaming PCs, hasn't been modernised or updated to run smoothly on contemporary machines. The game looks and feels dated. Despite this lack of modernisation, it carries a pretty high price tag for such an old game. This seems to have be lingering on Steam with an inflated price to try profit from abandonware. It's a very bare bones simplistic "I Can't Believe It's Not Adobe Flash" game (slapped together with Construct 2, so almost as bad). It's a soldier attack/defense game, you know the ones, an autobattler where all you do is spam out as many units as you can afford while your opponent (AI, because nobody in their right mind would play this garbage seriously) does the same. The units fight each other and whoever basically has more units wins. It's been done a million times better in browser games and mobile apps, but this 11 year old garbage is here on Steam, and the developer seriously thinks people are going to pay him money for it. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing. The controls can't be customised because the game has such a dumbed down, simplified interface that it's just point and click stuff like a browser/Flash game. The fact that the interface is this dumbed down might be seen as a problem in itself, however... this is a fairly shallow experience if you're the kind of gamer that likes to play games with deep, rich control schemes and interaction. You'll get none of that here. Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the Construct 2/Construct 3 game engine/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset sometimes used by amateur developers as it doesn't require advanced game development skills, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities (it's worse than GameMaker Studio!). Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. You don't have to take my word about how bad the game is, we can measure the interest in a game by how much people bothered to play it. "Shadows of War" has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the game absolutely failed to capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is "Day 1 Complete", for finishing the first mission, trivial to achieve, but less than 10 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the game. That's a tiny, tiny proportion of gamers who even bothered with this. Ouch. So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 110,000+ games on Steam? "Shadows of War" is relatively expensive for an abandonware nostalgia gouge, at $2 USD, and it's not worth it. The game is just too old, hasn't been modernised. And as the old saying goes, you can't go home again. Even when it was new, this was never a triple-A game. This is the kind of game that went almost directly from the warehouse into the cheap bargain bins at the front of the shop. Now, on Steam, without any modernisation? This is impossible to recommend. This is also competing with over 14,000 free games available on Steam, many of them far better than this paid product.