Future Wars Demo

Every strategy game out there shares some characteristics when it comes to gameplay, but the mechanics differ depending on the genre and the ideas that drive the action. Hence, while titles like StarCraft require quick reaction times and good coordination, these skills are not as important while playing Heroes of Might and Magic, because you get plenty of time to think about the next move.

Future Wars aims to emulate games like Advanced Wars and Battle Isle, while also introducing a few of its own ideas into the mix. The result is something that feels like you’ve played it before, yet it lacks the proper elements to make you want to re-live the experience. Hence, the game quickly loses its grip on you and it doesn’t feature enough good parts to be worth the trouble.

To start off with, the entire thing takes place in a futuristic world, as the name clearly implies. There is a singleplayer campaign which expands on the subject and puts you in the role of a college student that learns how to handle himself in command of an entire battlefield, but the plot gets lost in translation along the way and it is not very interesting to begin with anyway.

As far as the actual gameplay is concerned, your main goal is to either destroy all the other enemy units, or occupy certain objectives before the opponent gets a chance to do the same. Hence, it’s all about navigating the environment in an efficient way and calculating the damage potential of different units. Unfortunately, the selection of units is quite low and you find out everything there is to know after only a few missions, which is certainly disappointing.

Not only that, but the missions themselves get incredibly repetitive not long after the tutorial is over and you start dealing with the actual scenarios. The same goes for the multiplayer sessions, since the low number of options put at your disposal seriously hurt the replayability factor and make it difficult to enjoy more than a handful of matches in total.

While Future Wars is not exactly terrible, it does lack everything you would want to find in a solid strategy game. In short, it is too basic and too repetitive to be worth the trouble, especially since you can have a lot more fun and excitement by trying out something else from the massive catalog available online nowadays.