Eyes of War has been in Early Access since July 2023 and the team at Good Mood Games have been constantly adding new units, new maps and making changes. So lets see what it looks like in 2024!
Eyes of War is a 2 to 4 player Real Time Strategy game set in a Medieval era, giving you control of an Empire to crush your enemies. But, there is something else that makes Eyes of War stand out. Alongside standard RTS gameplay, you can also control every unit you create in a Third Person “character” mode adding to the action.
There are currently 3 games modes, with a fourth coming soon. Strategy mode seems to be the focus of Eyes of War as the other 2 modes are parts of Strategy mode separated out. I’ll talk about them later.
There are currently 4 Armies to choose from, each with very different units and play styles. Like the Norvion. They have 6 Hand to Hand units but only one Archer whereas the Solvong have Archers on War Elephants but only 1 type of Calvery unit.
Eyes of war has 6 maps to choose from ranging from Forests, Deserts, and Snow-covered Mountains.
When you load into the battle, you have one scout unit, a castle, and some resources. Like most RTS games it’s a scramble to gather resources and mount a defense early. No matter how quickly I built up my base and started creating units the enemy would always do it faster. They would send in a little scouting party of horses and archers before I could get together some basic infantry. If you can survive this early attack things seem to calm down for a while.
There are 4 separate resources. Wood, Stone, Steel and Gold. The way resources are collected is very clever. Wood is collected from trees using Lumber camps. Place these next to some trees and you will get wood. They are very cheap so craft a lot of them, wood is used for almost every unit so you will need a lot of it.
The other 3 resources come from the same node. Once you place a mining camp near a node you can gather Rock, Steel, and Gold from the same node at the same time by adjusting a sliding bar. You can get 33% of each or 50/50 Gold and Steel but no Rock, it’s a brilliantly simple way that can be adjusted at any point. Running low on Gold, just slide that bar up to 100%. However, they are all joined. So, if you have multiple mines and adjust the slider it will adjust for every mine you own. I kept changing mine to almost 100% when a particular resource got low. Rock is used for Castle Walls and Defense Structures where Gold and Steel are used for Upgrades and the more advanced units like War Elephants.
Speaking of Defense, you win by destroying your opponent’s castle, so building walls early is a must. Your resource gathering buildings are so cheap that you don’t really need to protect them.
The other great thing is there are no villagers, so you can build as many structures and have as many work camps as you want.
Let’s talk combat.
Once you have built up your defenses and have some resources coming in, it’s time to raise an army. There are 4 different “classes” that are trained from different buildings like barracks or siege workshops. Depending on your starting army you might only have 1 unit to select from each class, but I would suggest having a varied army. Each unit has its pros and cons against different units. I have had 20+ Calvery wiped out by a few archers and spearmen.
Eyes of War is very slow paced. The time it takes to train a single unit is anywhere from 15 to 60 seconds, so you won’t be pumping out troops to defend your Castle. The same goes for movement. Each unit has a different marching pace, so if you have an army of different units they travel at the pace of the slowest unit.
There are 2 different “views’ when it comes to combat. You use the classic “strategy” view to maneuver your troops to engage. Then when your forces clash with the enemies is when Eyes of War really comes to life. You pick a single unit, any unit, maybe you Elephant Archer or one of you Berserker’s press “E” and you fly down into “Character” mode. This turns Eyes of War into a 3rd person hack and slash. The 3rd person combat is very fun, if you have a shield, you can block arrows and attacks, and there are cool execution animations. If you are riding a horse, you must keep moving or you will be killed very quickly.
The battlefield is chaotic, and you are just wildly swinging, slashing your way through anyone that stands in your way, its brilliant. At any point you can switch to another unit by looking at it and pressing “E” and you can exit “Character” mode at any point by pressing “Q” to be able to direct your troops from a better angle. You can give your troops orders in “character” mode, but I found it much easier to leave and come back.
The other 2 modes are Arena and Battle. Arena is a Coliseum style battle between one or two units controlled in the 3rd person. It is very fun and fast paced. Battle is just the combat side of Strategy without the resource gathering and defending your Castle. You select your army and units before the battle. Then you line them up facing each other and charge. The final unit standing wins. With the slow nature of Strategy mode Battle mode became my favorite mode to play.
I only had one weird performance issue, every now and then it would freeze when I entered “character” mode if there was a lot happening on the screen. I found a quick ALT+TAB out and back in fixed it up straight away. It didn’t happen a lot but enough for me to mention.
If there is one thing out Eyes of War, that lets me down is the sound. There is a low Classical piece of music playing all the time that ramps up when there is battle which is fine. However, there is no ambient noises of animals or wind or even generic town noises. During battle there is only one human “huh” sound effect as well as a clash of steel and a squelch of blood. Its such a shame as the rest of the game is a lot of fun.
I am having a fantastic time with Eyes of War. I think it has a very solid base and can not wait to see where they team take it.
I would like to thank the team at Good Mood Games for the review code.
Eyes of war was reviewed on PC and is currently availabe in Early Access on Steam.
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