Strategy games are an odd genre. I happen to love them with all my heart. However, I will not deny that sometimes they are very, very difficult to access for more casual players. Turn Based Strategy games are often like a game of chess, requiring you to think turns in advance to outwit your enemy. Real time strategy games require much faster thinking and split second decisions. It’s not always something that everyone can really get into. Sometimes I–even as the strategy buff I am–have great difficulty getting into certain games. But what if there was a strategy game that took away the needless complexities of most games, stripping things down to very basic and easy to understand mechanics, while still maintaining a sizable amount of strategy and planning? Well, that’s where Crush Your Enemies comes in.
Crush Your Enemies is a real time strategy game that focuses less on long, thought out plans and more on the idea of “How quickly can I absolutely decimate the opposing force?” Levels are small and are typically over in a matter of a few minutes, and in rare cases, under a minute.
The game follows the adventures of a clan of foul mouthed barbarians who seem to be walking Conan jokes. Before even playing you’ll be immediately entertained with the crass and ridiculous writing that mixes medieval and modern cultures. 90% of the game’s humor stems from “What new insult can we make up next?” And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The game doesn’t have any real story, other than the continuing journey of this clan of oafs destroying everything in their path. However, it doesn’t really need one, either.
The actual game starts you on a map screen. Initially you’ll only be able to choose what level you go to next, but as you progress more and more side content begins to open up. Levels themselves are very small and often have few obstacles. You’ll start with a group of units who you must use to capture buildings and CRUSH YOUR ENEMIES!
Your initial units are very weak. They can either be used for combat, or they can be put into a recruitment building to generate more units, and they can be sent to unique buildings to upgrade them into different combat units with stronger abilities. Up to 50 units can be in one group. Got all that? Well, that’s pretty much everything there is to Crush Your Enemies. Later on you gain access to defense buildings and the ability to use items to buff your units, but other than that, the gameplay is simple.
Later on in the game, you’ll start finding villages that you can raid. Every village you take over will give you some beer after each successfully beaten main mission. This beer can later be used to buy the aforementioned buff items. Crush Your Enemies took me by surprise with how much content it introduces. I expected it to be the same process over and over, but variety does indeed present itself rather quickly. It makes the game fairly addictive.
Each level contains 3 objectives, the first of which is mandatory while the other two are optional. These objectives can range from “Capture all enemy tiles,” to “Survive for 3 minutes,” to “Crush your enemies in 1 minute 30 seconds.” Unfortunately I found some of these objectives to be a bit, well, absurd. Not in a funny way, but in an impossibly difficult way. I consider myself a perfectionist, so you best believe I’m going to riot if I can’t get a perfect rating on every mission.
Sadly, some of these objectives are just too ridiculous to bother completing. It’s mostly the combo of the “Crush your enemies within this time period” and “have this many survivors at the end” objectives that do me in the most. Often times it requires less skill and more pure luck than anything, and that’s not what I would call enjoyable.
Crush Your Enemies is very mobile-centric. The aforementioned 3 star rating system is proof of this, as well as the fact that the controls are touch and drag based. Unfortunately, these controls do not translate well to PC (the platform I made the mistake of playing on) at all. The game itself is very, very fun to play. However, the controls can hamper it quite a bit due to not being as intuitive for mouse use. The gameplay itself can also get stale quickly, and is much more suited towards short bursts — another reason why I would suggest playing this game on Android or iOS.
So in conclusion, Crush Your Enemies is definitely an addictive, crude, hilarious, and aesthetically pleasing game (I love me some pixel art), but it’s drawn back a bit by some of its unnecessarily difficult side objectives and its minor inaccessibility on PC as opposed to mobile. However, I definitely think it’s worth the price if you’re a fan of real time strategy and you’re looking for something a bit less complicated to try out.
If you’d like to try the game out before buying it, a demo is available on Steam!
A PC code for Crush your Enemies was provided by Gambitious Digital Entertainment for the purpose of this review
Crush Your Enemies
Pros
- Simple, addicting, easy to get into, yet strategic and rewarding gameplay
- Ridiculously crude and hilarious writing
- Beautiful pixelated art style
Cons
- Achieving 3 star ratings on some missions is much too difficult
- The game's controls and playstyle don't translate well to a non-mobile platform
