War Mongrels – Review

Destructive Creations’ War Mongrels is set during World War 2 and rewards players who approach its stages with stealth and strategy. It’s a real-time stealth tactics game like Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines or Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive, played from an isometric top-down perspective. But does it work as a formula?

Player characters in War Mongrels are Wehrmacht soldiers Manfred and Ewald. War Mongrels establishes quickly that they are in the “Eastern Front” fighting against Soviet Russia, complete with bombing of trenches. The deaths of two travelling companions in a truck explosion prompt Manfred and Ewald to quickly desert from the German war machine. There are a few shockingly violent sequences in this game, therefore it’s not recommended for kids. Furthermore, the game’s themes of murder, torture, and war are dark and disturbing.

While the game makes clear that it is a work of fiction, it does provide historical context through animated comic segments explaining the war machine and what they did and through in-game collectibles that delve further into this.

The voice acting and dialogue in War Mongrels may be hysterically poor, which is the game’s main flaw. Hearing Doug Cockle, the voice actor for Geralt of Rivia, play Ewald is entertaining at first, but the joke quickly wears thin. Especially when a guard spotted you and murdered you and you had to restart the checkpoint for the twentieth time.

Here we reach the heart of the gameplay in War Mongrels. In War Mongrels, your units must accomplish a variety of tasks across a variety of levels. If you have Ewald and Lukas in your group, for instance, you’ll be in charge of both of them as you try to finish the mission without getting killed by making use of their unique skills. There are normally two methods for accomplishing this. The first strategy involves sneaking up on guards on patrol and eliminating them one by one. The second option is to use lethal force to eliminate the threat. The latter usually results in your characters dying and forcing you to start over from a previous save. However, there are some cases where fighting is successful.

War Mongrels’ “Planning Mode” is where its stealth gameplay really shines. The game can be paused so that players can plot out their next move. After leaving the planning phase, they can act simultaneously on these decisions. This will allow you to perform numerous sophisticated moves in one swift motion, such as disabling multiple guards at once. The action of throwing a bottle to distract a guard so that one of your characters may sneak up and kill him is excellent, but the execution of this strategy in the planning mode is much better.

So, you’ll need to play very strategically and plan your every move in order to succeed at War Mongrels. You will lose a lot of lives, and you’ll have to learn how to play the game through a lot of trial and error. The key to progressing through stages is learning opponent pathways, avoiding their vision cones, and watching their behaviours. One of the keys to success is becoming familiar with your unit’s unique skills and learning how and when to employ them.

However, War Mongrels has a lot of problems. As of the time of this review’s publication, a number of patches have been released, each of which fixes a different issue with the game. There is still more work to be done to fix this game, and the patch notes on Steam are fairly lengthy.

War Mongrels has stunning visuals. The incredible attention to detail in the game’s stages makes it a top contender for best-looking isometric game of all time. In order to take in the stunning aesthetics of a level, players will frequently find themselves spinning the camera around. War Mongrels’ score, composed by Adam Skorupa, has numerous moody orchestral tracks that complement the game’s grim aesthetic.

War Mongrels is a fascinating tactical stealth game overall, but it suffers from pathing issues with units, weird bugs, and repetitive gameplay that will irritate impatient players. We recommend breaking up the game into smaller portions so that you don’t become too tired from having to replay the same section of a level over and over again because of an error.