Have you ever imagined what it’s like to take control and fight as one of the units you send out to battle in classic RTS games like Age of Empires, C&C, etc? Eyes of War allows you to do exactly that. Whether it is a knight, archer, cavalier, or even a siege unit, Eyes of War lets you walk in their shoes and experience the battlefield from their perspective.
But is this the only trope the game has, or is it actually a solid strategy game that can keep you hooked for hours? Good Mood Games developed eyes of War, and it is currently an early-access title that shows some potential it can have in its full release. But the reality is that even by early access standards, the game falls short on many different aspects in its current state.
Great Variety, Shallow Depth
Eyes of War is marketed as an RTS game, and it delivers that by giving you four civilizations to choose from and six different maps to play on. However, that’s not the only game mode. There are three distinct game modes: strategy, Arena, and Battle.
Strategy is your typical RTS type of gameplay where I had to build my base, collect resources, gather an army, and eventually destroy the enemy base to win. This is the gameplay that most players will be interested in playing.
Arena is an interesting mode where it pits 2v2 units to fight over a best of three rounds, and you get to select two unique units each round without repeating them. This mode focuses on the gameplay’s player-controlled unit aspect rather than a grand strategy.
Finally, Battle is a mode where I could set up a whole army of any units I wanted from any of the civilizations and pit them against another army on a small map, thinking of it as Total War. There is no grand strategy in this mode, no collecting resources and building bases, just a battle on a limited battleground.
With so much variety in gameplay, you would think that is a positive, but from what I saw and experienced, it felt like the game lacked a certain identity, and I was confused about what it was actually trying to be. There are multiple game modes but none of them have much in terms of depth.
The Battle mode is great in theory, where I could pit different types of armies against each other. However, when it comes down to the epic battle I was expecting, it just turns out to be highly chaotic, random, and barely understandable as the AI runs around in random directions. Taking control of a unit in a large-scale battle makes it even more confusing and chaotic.
No Candy in These Eyes of War
When it comes to the graphical fidelity and look of the game, one word can explain it: bad. It has a certain look that can appeal to certain audiences who would want their game to look like the old Age of Empires games, but from a 2024 standpoint, it just does not look appealing to me.
That’s besides the fact that it’s severely underoptimized; anything above the medium graphic settings gave me some serious stutter and FPS drops. Even on the ultra settings with the FPS barely reaching 20, the game did not look like you would expect. I am impressed by the fact that it had great ultra-wide resolution support, but unfortunately, because of how bad it runs in general, I was forced to play at a lower setting without the ultra-wide aspect ratio.
Apart from the obvious performance issues, the game is also riddled with bugs and glitches. I would forgive this because the game is in early access, but the bugs and the overall clunky feel of everything are too much, even for early access. Things like invisible people, rigid animations, bad textures, random units in the middle of nowhere in a T-pose, and it goes on.
The camera movements are often nauseating, especially when you take control of the character, as they seem to be rigged to the unit’s head and move with it as it wobbles. The mouse-wheel zoom from the top-down perspective is the worst as it zooms in rather than moving the camera’s position closer, as you would imagine.
When looking from the eyes of a unit, things in the distance are just not rendered, and many other things, like trees, bushes, etc., will pop in as you get closer. This is likely because the game still works like it’s rendering from a top-down perspective even when you can see far into the distance from the perspective of the unit.
Entry Level RTS Gameplay at Best
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room: How good is the actual RTS gameplay, i.e., the Strategy mode? As I mentioned before, the game is torn between figuring out its own identity, and I wholeheartedly believe that the RTS part of it has so much potential that could exist right now if only Good Mood Games had focused entirely on the Strategy mode.
There are four civilizations to choose from, each with its own unique lore and distinct look to its units and structures. Each civilization also has a couple of unique units apart from the standard units like Swordmen, Archers, etc. that all civilizations get. Certain civilizations will also have certain building upgrades from the start.
These skirmish matches can be played on six different maps, each providing a unique challenge. For example, the Barren Lands is a mostly open-space map set in the deserts, while the Serpent’s Pass is nestled between forests and hills that create narrow passages. I was impressed by how different each map was, although the size of all of them leaves more to be desired.
The enemy periodically sends units to attack your base and even if you have units standing around on an offensive order, many times they just will not defend until you manually select them and tell them to attack the enemy units that are destroying a structure only about 10 meters from them, making me doubt if they really have the ‘Eyes of War’.
If you think controlling the units in these fights seems appealing, there is no actual advantage of doing so other than being able to see the battlefield from their perspective and without the fog of war. All you can do is press left-click on an enemy unit a bunch of times to kill it, something that the AI would’ve done anyway but maybe slightly worse.
In a Bad State, but Can Be Better
In its current state, Eyes of War is clunky and lackluster in its gameplay. It features good variety in its civilization uniqueness, environmental diversity in its maps, and multiple game modes. Still, it is plagued by severe performance and optimization issues, shallow depth in each of its game modes, and lacks a certain unique personality that makes it feel like a generic RTS title for the most part.
But its foundations are there, and the developers at Good Mood Games can turn this around into a spectacular and unique RTS game by adding more depth and complexity to its gameplay and focusing more on what they call the Strategy mode. Until then, I would rather not keep my eyes on this war.
