This War of Mine: A grueling, depressing iPad game you really need to play

You know what to expect when it comes to war games, right? Lots of shooting, action, and bravery. This War of Mine isn’t like that. At all.

For starters, you don’t play as a soldier, or a band of fighters. Instead you’re in charge of a small group of ordinary Eastern Europeans trapped in a war zone, just trying to survive on a day-to-day basis by whatever means possible. This includes scavenging, bartering, and stealing. While there are moments of positivity, the chief feelings you’ll experience as you play the game are hopelessness and despair. But that’s what makes it so great. This War of Mine stays with you long after you’ve turned off the iPad.

When you start the game for the first time you find yourself in charge of the lives of three people -- Marko, Pavle, and Bruno -- who are holed up in a crumbling old building. Much of the space is inaccessible, due to piles of rubble and locked and broken doors. Unlike the tooled-up battle hardened heroes you’d normally control in war games, these three are just regular guys who are injured, sick, tired, and completely ill equipped to handle the war raging around them.

You can switch between the characters, and gameplay involves tapping on the icons around the building to search for items that might help improve the team’s lot -- food, medicine, bandages, wood, electrical items and so on. Get together enough of the right items, and you can build objects like beds, or chairs. Digging away rubble and repairing or unlocking doors opens up additional spaces to explore. The problem is, you never find much, and the fragile state of the people you’re controlling means they can’t work as hard as you’d wish.

Each person has a defining ability -- Bruno is a good cook (before the war he was a restaurant owner and TV chef), Pavle is a fast runner (who used to be a soccer star), and Marko is a skilled scavenger (who worked as a firefighter). Taking into account their skills might help keep the group alive, although you’ll have to use each person for lots of different tasks.

Night falling brings new challenges as you have to decide what each person will do. If they’re sick, or tired, sleeping might be the best action. But you’ll probably want to set a guard too, as you’re not alone in the war-zone and there’s the very real chance someone will break into your building and take the resources you’ve spent all day gathering. You’ll also want to send someone off scavenging.

There are various buildings nearby -- hospitals, schools, construction sites, cottages and the like -- and you can choose one to explore and scavenge. As the game progresses more destinations appear, although some existing ones will become inaccessible due to fighting, and it’s important to select your target for the night mission wisely. A description will tell you what sort of items are to be found there, and give you an idea of the type of people you’ll encounter. Some survivors will barter with you, others will defend their properties, while quite a few will shoot first and ask questions later.

It’s during the scavenging that you encounter the real drama. The first time I played through, I found myself stealing from an elderly couple. To me, I was just collecting resources in a game for some ill and hungry characters I was charged with keeping alive. But to the old man who watched me root through his person possessions, I was an utterly despicable human being, an example of how war can bring out of the worst in some people. "Please don’t take our things!" he pleaded repeatedly, as he followed me around. He had next to nothing, and I was taking it all from him, including his frail wife’s medicine. I felt bad, but it didn’t stop me.

On another night, quite far into the game, Bruno was shot and killed while rooting through a pile of rubbish. He’d found some wood and tobacco. To lose someone you’ve gotten to know, and even care about, so suddenly -- and for something so trivial -- was shocking. The impact on the survivors back at the crumbling building that was our home was even worse, sending them further into despair. There’s no saving the game before you do something potentially risky and then reloading it if things go wrong. If things go wrong in the game, they stay wrong forever.

Continuing to steal from other survivors, which was my main tactic in the first play through, had an impact on my group's morale too, leaving them to question their/my choices and wonder if, surely, there wasn’t a better way to survive.

There is, of course. You don’t just have steal from others. You can grow food, set traps for animals (rats!), filter rainwater, brew alcohol, roll cigarettes, and barter things you find or make for items you need. You can upgrade your workshop to create more advanced items, and then upgrade some of the items, like the stove for example.

This involves collecting all the right items you need for the upgrade, and then all the right items you need to produce the objects. You’ll often send a scavenger out to try and find something you desperately need only for them to come back tired, possibly injured, and missing the vital supplies.

There’s lots of grinding here but, unlike other games, there’s thankfully no option to make life easier with an in-app purchase. Something like that really would have cheapened the experience.

Having learned some big lessons in my first play through I stole much less the second time around, and treated people how I wanted my group to be treated, and things were much more positive as a result.

You can, with perseverance, do well, but your worldly goods -- such as they are -- can be taken away in a single night when raiders come in and help themselves. At night you follow the character who is scavenging and you only discovered what happened back at base when he (or she) returns there.

Fortunately, you can patch up the building to make it less vulnerable to attacks, and tool up whoever you have guarding the place to reduce your losses.

Life can be made more bearable by adding entertainment, cigarettes and alcohol to the lives of the group, but you have to decide if you want to cheer up a depressed survivor with a drink, or trade the alcohol for food. And how useful will a drunk be if raiders arrive in the night?

Occasionally people will come to your door, and you can choose whether to help them or not. There are lots of moral choices to be made in TWoM and you have to weigh up helping where possible with what’s best for the group. Bringing in another person will mean another pair of hands to build items, defend the building, and scavenge, but they’ll also be another mouth to feed, and food is scarce. But if you don't provide them with somewhere to stay, will they die? It's a very real possibility.

There’s plenty of variety in the game, with loads of different places to visit at night. When all of your characters die, or the hopelessness is too much for you to continue, you can quit and restart. This will give you a choice of groups to care for, each with their own characters and stories, so you can experience surviving the war from a different angle.

I play a lot of games on iOS. Many are fun, some are involving, but few are as vital as This War of Mine. It’s beautifully presented with pencil drawn graphics, and a mournful tune that plays over the sounds of gunfire and falling bombs. The game can, at times, get a little tedious, but then so can real life. It makes the moments of drama all the more thrilling, and all the more affecting.

This War of Mine haunts you, and makes you consider of the plight of people in real war zones in a way that you might otherwise not do. At $9.99 it’s one of the more expensive games you’ll find on iOS, but it’s well worth it.

You can buy it here.