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War for the West is an interactive medieval fantasy novel where you fill the shoes of a young lord/lady ruling a province of the recently conquered Western Peninsula. Administrate your realm with the help of your councilors of questionable loyalty and intention, fight foes worldly and otherwise and steer the fate of more than the Western Peninsula. Will you be a tyrant, who takes what he wants to fill his ambitions and needs, will you be a just ruler, watching his realm prosper, or something else entirely?
Review:
The game starts you off with a character creator. The options seem extensive at first, but, aside from the stat distribution, Many choices like the heritage of your house, are mostly for flavour or for cosmetics. Still, I find the customization options are satisfactory overall, since they give you the opportunity to mold your house to your liking, even if it doesn't affect gameplay too much.
As you start the game, you might find yourself overwhelmed by all the choices, because the novel is slightly front loaded with it's events. Most of them can or will happen very early into the novel, leaving you, if you chose like me, starved for money and time, since it takes a lot of funds and time to really make your fief earn money. But that is not necessarily a bad thing: It gives the novel a sense of urgency and pressure that you have to perform well as a lord, which is the feeling it should convey the whole way through. Unfortunately, many of the story-progressing events can be postponed indefinitely (At least I believe so. I postponed one of the final battles for multiple months to prepare further and nothing bad happened), giving you infinite time to prepare while also removing the urgency and a bit of the immersion. I mean, after having encamped at my border for two months waiting for me, it feels a bit odd that the rival lord wouldn't just proceed with his campaign as planned.
If you're looking for a game with a lot of choices, this is definitely one for you. There are choices to make every day, resulting in many different paths for the story to go. Some of the choices have little to no impact, but that makes sense: Solving a dispute between two rival farmers isn't going to change your whole realm. Other choices seem tiny at first, but have huge repercussions later, like your character dying early. I have by no means explored all paths, but I do plan on replaying the game.
The novel is actually surprisingly "difficult", if you can even call novels "difficult". Achieving the ending I want in one of these types of interactive novels usually happens on my first playthrough, but not in this one. In my first playthrough my lord died because of one thing I didn't do early into the game and on my second playthrough he was imprisoned and tortured for years by a shadowy organization.
What I'm saying is: This novel is tricky. Coming in unprepared, it is almost impossible to predict the outcome of some of your choices and I definitely recommend playing through the novel multiple times to see what you can do differently.
Note that this "difficulty" is by no means a bad thing, I actually like it. However, the game does feature a save system that lets you save at most points of the story, giving you a lot of leeway to experiment and "exploit" the game (I'll talk about this "exploit" in the last section of the review).
Before I wrap this review up and adress a few miscellaneous points, I want to adress the writing of the novel as a whole: It is engaging to say the least. As I went through the novel, I found hours just melting away. The writing is engaging and coupled with the medium of interactive novels, which grants unparalleled immersion and empathy to the characters, I found myself simply shackled to the phone. I couldn't stop until it was over. The novel knows when to describe things in more detail and when the be concise and give just enough information for the reader to stay informed.
Now that I'm done with the main points of the game I want to quickly go over some of the very rare bugs that occur, the jarring lag in the game and a little pet peeve of mine:
As I mentioned there appear to be a few minor bugs in this game, but they are very rare. All I could find were chunks of text or choices repeating themselves on very rare occasions, so nothing major overall.
A thing I find absolutely inexcusable is the weird lag that occurs from time to time. Sometimes the game will take multiple seconds to load to the next chunk of text while the previous text is frozen, halfway out of the screen. It might be a result of playing the game for a long time without quitting the app, but it should not happen either way. The game has almost no graphics and should not take much of your phones power to compute. This didn't ruin the experience, but it certainly didn't improve it either.
My third and final remark is probably just a bit of a pet peeve, likely stemming from my short temper and occasional tendency to be impatient, but I wanted to bring it up either way: in this novel there is a card game called "cardeed" that you can play with your councilors and a few other NPCs. It is a very simple game and I will not go into greater detail about the rules, but something bugs me about how it is implemented. You play the game for money and a considerable amount at that. Playing cardeed and cleaning out your councilors pockets nets a surprising amount of funds for the treasury, something you'll direly need early on. It feels odd having your province's economy depend on the lord winning a simple card game, almost entirely based on luck, against his councilors. I routinely found myself frustrated at the game when I was losing money in cardeed, especially when I really needed it, due to sheer bad luck. But, as I mentioned earlier in the review, there is a way to exploit cardeed to greatly raise your chances of winning. If you find yourself with a bad hand, you simply click on the "show stats" button, then return to the game and you'll magically have a different hand. You can do this until you have an almost unbeatable hand, which feels incredibly gamey and takes you out of the immersion a little. Still I found myself performing this trick again and again, because cardeed was simply such a good source of income.
Would you recommend this to other users? Apart from the flaws and quirks I mentioned, this is still an incredible interactive novel overall. Good writing and impactful choices make up for the questionable game design decisions and make the novel a good experience. Due to the branching paths and many "bad endings" I also mentioned, the game has a good chunk of reread value.
Rating (1-5):
War for the West is an interactive medieval fantasy novel where you fill the shoes of a young lord/lady ruling a province of the recently conquered Western Peninsula. Administrate your realm with the help of your councilors of questionable loyalty and intention, fight foes worldly and otherwise and steer the fate of more than the Western Peninsula. Will you be a tyrant, who takes what he wants to fill his ambitions and needs, will you be a just ruler, watching his realm prosper, or something else entirely?
Review:
The game starts you off with a character creator. The options seem extensive at first, but, aside from the stat distribution, Many choices like the heritage of your house, are mostly for flavour or for cosmetics. Still, I find the customization options are satisfactory overall, since they give you the opportunity to mold your house to your liking, even if it doesn't affect gameplay too much.
As you start the game, you might find yourself overwhelmed by all the choices, because the novel is slightly front loaded with it's events. Most of them can or will happen very early into the novel, leaving you, if you chose like me, starved for money and time, since it takes a lot of funds and time to really make your fief earn money. But that is not necessarily a bad thing: It gives the novel a sense of urgency and pressure that you have to perform well as a lord, which is the feeling it should convey the whole way through. Unfortunately, many of the story-progressing events can be postponed indefinitely (At least I believe so. I postponed one of the final battles for multiple months to prepare further and nothing bad happened), giving you infinite time to prepare while also removing the urgency and a bit of the immersion. I mean, after having encamped at my border for two months waiting for me, it feels a bit odd that the rival lord wouldn't just proceed with his campaign as planned.
If you're looking for a game with a lot of choices, this is definitely one for you. There are choices to make every day, resulting in many different paths for the story to go. Some of the choices have little to no impact, but that makes sense: Solving a dispute between two rival farmers isn't going to change your whole realm. Other choices seem tiny at first, but have huge repercussions later, like your character dying early. I have by no means explored all paths, but I do plan on replaying the game.
The novel is actually surprisingly "difficult", if you can even call novels "difficult". Achieving the ending I want in one of these types of interactive novels usually happens on my first playthrough, but not in this one. In my first playthrough my lord died because of one thing I didn't do early into the game and on my second playthrough he was imprisoned and tortured for years by a shadowy organization.
What I'm saying is: This novel is tricky. Coming in unprepared, it is almost impossible to predict the outcome of some of your choices and I definitely recommend playing through the novel multiple times to see what you can do differently.
Note that this "difficulty" is by no means a bad thing, I actually like it. However, the game does feature a save system that lets you save at most points of the story, giving you a lot of leeway to experiment and "exploit" the game (I'll talk about this "exploit" in the last section of the review).
Before I wrap this review up and adress a few miscellaneous points, I want to adress the writing of the novel as a whole: It is engaging to say the least. As I went through the novel, I found hours just melting away. The writing is engaging and coupled with the medium of interactive novels, which grants unparalleled immersion and empathy to the characters, I found myself simply shackled to the phone. I couldn't stop until it was over. The novel knows when to describe things in more detail and when the be concise and give just enough information for the reader to stay informed.
Now that I'm done with the main points of the game I want to quickly go over some of the very rare bugs that occur, the jarring lag in the game and a little pet peeve of mine:
As I mentioned there appear to be a few minor bugs in this game, but they are very rare. All I could find were chunks of text or choices repeating themselves on very rare occasions, so nothing major overall.
A thing I find absolutely inexcusable is the weird lag that occurs from time to time. Sometimes the game will take multiple seconds to load to the next chunk of text while the previous text is frozen, halfway out of the screen. It might be a result of playing the game for a long time without quitting the app, but it should not happen either way. The game has almost no graphics and should not take much of your phones power to compute. This didn't ruin the experience, but it certainly didn't improve it either.
My third and final remark is probably just a bit of a pet peeve, likely stemming from my short temper and occasional tendency to be impatient, but I wanted to bring it up either way: in this novel there is a card game called "cardeed" that you can play with your councilors and a few other NPCs. It is a very simple game and I will not go into greater detail about the rules, but something bugs me about how it is implemented. You play the game for money and a considerable amount at that. Playing cardeed and cleaning out your councilors pockets nets a surprising amount of funds for the treasury, something you'll direly need early on. It feels odd having your province's economy depend on the lord winning a simple card game, almost entirely based on luck, against his councilors. I routinely found myself frustrated at the game when I was losing money in cardeed, especially when I really needed it, due to sheer bad luck. But, as I mentioned earlier in the review, there is a way to exploit cardeed to greatly raise your chances of winning. If you find yourself with a bad hand, you simply click on the "show stats" button, then return to the game and you'll magically have a different hand. You can do this until you have an almost unbeatable hand, which feels incredibly gamey and takes you out of the immersion a little. Still I found myself performing this trick again and again, because cardeed was simply such a good source of income.
Would you recommend this to other users? Apart from the flaws and quirks I mentioned, this is still an incredible interactive novel overall. Good writing and impactful choices make up for the questionable game design decisions and make the novel a good experience. Due to the branching paths and many "bad endings" I also mentioned, the game has a good chunk of reread value.
Rating (1-5):
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