Crush Your Enemies Review

The biggest problem that I’ve always had with Real Time Strategy games is keeping track of what’s going on. There’s always so much happening at any one time, and I am just not capable of micromanaging hundreds of units while spying on the opponent and building units that are best suited to kill them. The guys over at Vile Monarch clearly feel very similar with Crush Your Enemies, an RTS that has everything on a single screen.

Crush Your Enemies features a tribe of barbarians who want to take the land back from the Generian empire. As for the story, it’s not exactly Starcraft, but it doesn’t try to be either: Crush Your Enemies knows that it’s silly and embraces it wholeheartedly. From fourth wall breaks to some rather low brow jokes, if you were expecting a thoughtful and enthralling story you’ve come to the wrong place.

The actual gameplay is very basic: you have a group of units that you move around the tiles on the map. A tile can have a maximum of 50 units on it at any one time, and there are 4 different types of units: the basic grunt, the soldier, the archer and the shield bearers. These units each have their own strengths and weaknesses, the soldier is the strongest combat unit but if the archers can pin them down before they can attack they’re useless, while the shield bearers can deflect the ranged attack. You don’t build units as you do in a typical RTS, but rather use buildings on each map to train them.

Many of the battles can appear insurmountable

The buildings themselves are just a different tile, and not something you can build yourself. The first building you encounter is the camp, which turns units into grunts and is the main way of gaining new units. These are “recruited” on this tile - up to a maximum of 50 - and is one of two tiles that need at least one unit on it for it to work. The more units on the tile, the faster they work, and this is the main mechanic of Crush Your Enemies. More units do things faster, which is how Vile Monarch amp up the difficulty in the later singleplayer missions: the enemy start with more camps and more units than you do, so can spread much faster.

The other building that needs to be manned to work is the watchtower, which is a ranged upgrade to all units. These are rather ineffective unless you’ve had time to set up the area around the tower, especially since you can’t move on territory that the enemy controls without capturing it first. The only real advantage that the watchtowers have over the archers is the watchtower has no cooldown on its attack, so it can pin down a target indefinitely.

Available in each match are three powerups that sit at the top of the screen and can be used at any time. These range from a temporary camp which increases the number of units on that square for a short while, to a brew that boosts the damage that friendly units deal on that one tile temporarily. These restock between matches, but you can purchase more of them from the store which unlocks about ten matches into the singleplayer. The currency is beer, which you get three of from optional matches that are scattered throughout the map. These drop three beers every time you complete a match, and after a while you’ll be earning 15 beers each match.

Fireflies can make even barbarian armies look pretty

Every singleplayer match is rated, not by stars but by heads on spikes. To achieve the top rating the game asks you to perform tasks, some of which are standard and some of which are distinctly more outlandish. I found some of the tasks impossible, though I can certainly see a sense of challenge in trying for completion. The next match is often locked behind a requirement for a certain amount of spiked heads, though it’s easy enough to get two from each match and that was enough for me to get to the end.

As for multiplayer, there is one and it worked fine for me, although I only played a few matches. The same rules apply from the singleplayer, though the maps are now mirrors for fairness. I saw two maps, though I believe that there are more - not that I think it makes a massive difference. Other than that, the multiplayer seemed very stable and I didn’t have to wait very long to get a game.

I’d love to be really invested in Crush Your Enemies; it has a great style and is probably the easiest RTS to pick up I’ve ever played. However, that comes at the cost of it actually being fun, and it lacks the depth that would normally keep me engrossed. The biggest issue I have with it is the sheer lack of clear strategic diversity. Where in bigger RTS’, like Starcraft 2 or Grey Goo, it’s possible to win with a huge variety of strategies, in Crush Your Enemies it becomes entirely based on how good you are at micromanagement. It doesn’t have any of the macro that a lot of players rely on, and without it Crush Your Enemies feels very basic.