Warparty

Review

Let’s go back in time and find out how our ancestors used to live in their era. An era without electricity or anything that we take for granted in our daily lives. They were great hunters and the universal language wasn’t English, Spanish or French; it was a few vowels grumbled together and a lot of hand movements. What were their fears, and what dangers did they have to face each day just to survive, with only the most basic of tools to defend themselves? You probably guessed it, life in the Stone-Age. Welcome to Warparty!

Warparty is a real-time strategy game developed and published by Warcave and Crazy Monkeys Studios, set in the Stone-Age. This game is currently available on Early Access on the Steam Platform.

At this point in time, you can either initiate a skirmish against the AI, or play in the survival mode in the single player option. There will be a campaign mode soon. Otherwise you can play online against other players (1vs1 or 2vs2), either on a custom or ranked game.  

There is a tutorial which will take around 5 to 10 minutes to complete and will give you a good rundown on how to play the game.

In terms of factions, there are two out of three available right now: the Council of the Wise and the Necromancy. You can access all the information about each faction as well as the neutral units (which are dinosaurs - not the type of animal anyone would want to face) via the very thorough wiki gamepedia. 

The gameplay is fairly classic in regards to a Real-time Strategy genre of game, where you have to make sure you manage your resources well and quickly to construct buildings and units. In Warparty, you need to build farms, harvest berries for food, and collect crystals to accumulate wealth. Each unit and building will require a specific amount of food and number of crystals to be built. One thing that I personally like is that you can have as many units as you want, as long as you have enough housing built in your camp. The other point you need to look for is where are the shrines located within the map. These shrines are extremely important to your faction as they will regenerate power points when you capture them. These points will give you access to superpowers, such as lighting, meteor showers, war cry and more. There are 5 specifics powers per faction at this stage.  

As the game is set in the Stone Age, you’ll be able to build terrifying dinosaur units, such as the T-Rex Unit, and let me tell you they are absolutely magnificent when you launch them towards your enemy units, and rather scary when they are attacking yours. There are two ways to encounter these cute little creatures; for some unknown reason they are most of the time guarding crystal mines, so you’ll need to kill them off to access the mine.  The second way to kill them is if your opponent sends his /her own dinosaur to attack your units or camps. You’ll be rewarded with food each time you kill a neutral or guard dinosaur that has not been sent by your enemy. Each faction has its own hero and you’ll be able to give them additional talents each time you upgrade the main building in your settlement.

You can upgrade your settlement three times, which will give you access to plenty of other upgrades for your units and buildings. In terms of the AI, it is actually pretty good, especially in the survival mode, in my opinion. In terms of difficulty, you have the standard three: easy, normal and hard. If Warparty is the first RTS you’ve ever played, I strongly recommend starting with the easy difficulty. On the other hand, if you are well acquainted with this genre of game, jump straight into the normal, or even try your luck in the highest difficulty; it will be very challenging, let me tell you!

Great graphics and plenty of resolution options. Nice audio and the controls are pretty good, too. You can set up your own online game or jump into a ranked game if you find one. I know that the campaign mission is coming soon, but I wish that we had something to play right now.