Make War (Nintendo Switch) Review

Make War has two primary modes: a type of slowly unlocking campaign mode, and a sandbox mode. The main thrust is the player taking the role of an alien at the scene of major historical battles, adding units that modify the flow of the battle. Each challenge unlocks new units or more aliens to place down. The idea is having this perfect set up of mines, melee, range, and turrets to kill the enemy. As an example the first map is a battle in England around the year 1200, so with Vikings, arrows, and guys with swords; the red team is assaulting the beach and the blue team is the defender.

Initially tasks are simple like kill a few units with your alien units. Then it gets complicated like having one side win or another. At any time players can pause, reset, and reposition their units. It gets crazy with teleporters, paralyzers, turrets, and Tesla coils. Now, initially the unlocking part is kind of fun - getting new units, more guys, and so on. Some flaws start to become apparent, though, which drag down what otherwise could be a pretty fun experience. First is how the game clearly was made in another language, and was not translated well at all. Many sentences do not even make sense. Luckily that's not too important, but gives a cheap feel to it all. The biggest issue, however, are the controls.

Using a control stick to control a mouse is never a good idea in games, and this reviewer can't think of a single titles where it is done well. Precision is not that important, but the raw magnitude of how much clicking needs to be done starts to weigh. Furthermore this is missing simple things like a 'clean up' button to reposition units. Something so badly needed is nowhere to be found, and its often quicker resetting the game than trying to pick up units. Trying to 'puzzle' out the layouts is fun, but is starts to become annoying because the battles largely behave randomly. This goes on too long for its own good, when the player is ready to move to a new area that game is still throwing new enemy layouts and asking to kill 45 guys with just mines. It loses its charm.

Unfortunately players have to play the campaign to get the other levels to unlock in sandbox mode. In this mode players can set up their own crazy battles, and it is pretty fun mode to experiment with. There are clear imbalances - whereas the archers have dumb AI (will shoot 100 arrows at 1 target), snipers in WW2 are absolutely insane as they 'smart target' (10 will target 10 separate enemies), and blow away all competition. It gets a kind of weird challenge seeing how huge of an army of 50 snipers can hold off, really.

In the end, there are some fun things, but this would have been far better served by being on the PC, having its campaign mode shortened considerable, and allowing all units open from the beginning in sandbox mode, and even allowing cross-era units to battle. Furthermore, it actually would have been more interesting if this went with a more historical bent to having to "win" battles that were won in real life (apparently only due to the alien intervention), instead of just random puzzles with a vague historical backdrop.