Eyes of War is an intriguing title that I have had my eye on for quite a while. It is a weird blend of RTS and city-building mechanics, but you can also take over a soldier on the battlefield and fight in the third person.
It is time for another episode of Scar Tries, the unoriginal show where I try some more experimental video games. I coined the idea when my review backlog was as long as my arm, and it is a way for me to cover games as a ‘First Impressions’ deal. I wish I had more free time alongside my health to play these games more, but I think it is important, too. Those opening couple of hours are essential to decide if a game is worth playing, especially with refund windows.
There is a lot of ambition here, and Eyes of War left Early Access a couple of months ago. That was the perfect time for me to try out the game, and thanks to the developers at Good Mood Games for providing us with a review copy!
The first thing is determining what Eyes of War is like as a video game. With its city-building and real-time strategy gameplay, it feels like a mix of Mount and Blade: Warband and Age of Empires, although the city-building side of the game is geared towards the combat side. There aren’t any colony sim aspects, and the town building is pretty streamlined.
While it has left Early Access, Eyes of War is still receiving frequent updates, and the developers are responding well to player feedback. I was initially concerned that the game would slow down after full release, as there are some flaws to address. Fortunately, the team at Good Mood Games shows no signs of slowing down after the 1.0 launch.
As with my usual early impression pieces, I played for a few hours to get a feel for the game. Eyes of War has been created with passion and heart, and we do not have many games like this on the market. While city building and commanding armies are the same genre, we rarely see them go hand in hand. This is hard enough to balance for the Total War franchise, let alone a tiny team like Good Mood Games. I found the army management the better portion of the game, and I had fun building up my armies and going to war against roaming bandit forces.
I drew the short straw regarding technical problems, and I experienced quite a lot of jank during my brief time in Eyes of War. Some things, such as unit pathing and animations, feel clumsy, and the enemy AI could be improved. Sometimes, the enemy units do clever things. Still, more often than not, I had enemies charging at my line without any regard for strategy or tactics, like a group of angry, heavily armed lemmings running off a cliff into lava and fire sharks.
More serious were the crashes. I did not expect to encounter so many problems with Eyes of War. The optimization could be a little better, as I struggled to hit 60FPS with an RTX 3060, above the recommended system requirements. I’m okay with turning down settings and the like for better performance, but hard crashes to the desktop while doing mundane things such as putting down a resource gathering building is a little harder to swallow. PC gaming has all kinds of variables, of course, so a lot can happen behind the scenes. Still, I had many more crashes and glitches than I would have liked, so I recommend that Good Mood Games look into improving the technical aspects of the game first.
My experience somewhat leaves me confused about how to recommend Eyes of War. There is a lot of admirable ambition here, and Eyes of War brings something fresh to the table that should provide some decent fun. It is also reasonably priced at just $15, and with some work, there is a good game here. What I’ll do is return to Eyes of War in a few months and see if patches have improved the game for me.
