Thank you Pantaloon for sending us a review code!

I want to start off this review with a spoiler warning. From the trailers on the Steam web page, it's clear that little is meant to be given away ahead of time as to what kind of experience It Takes A War will actually deliver. If you're just here to see if the game is worth playing and the moral highlights above are of no concern to you, then yes: it's a worthwhile experience, if a short one. If you want to know more details, then read on.

It Takes A War is a narrative first-person experience disguised as a Counter-Strike clone. For people familiar with Thomas Mackinnon's previous game, The Corridor, this should come as little surprise. The Corridor was a short experience in the same vein as The Stanley Parable, in which the player and narrator (or in this case, the game developer himself) are in direct conflict. Whereas the former game was more silly, It Takes A War goes in the opposite direction, leaning into full-blown psychological horror at times.

For those unfamiliar with it, Counter-Strike is a multiplayer online first-person shooter game in which a group of players are dropped into a small map for a series of very short rounds. Each round lasts only a couple of minutes and ends when all of one team's players are killed. After a set number of rounds, the team with the most wins wins the match.

Understanding this is crucial, because everything I just described is the vehicle that moves the actual story of It Takes A War forward. It's the actual gameplay that you'll experience moment to moment: you and a team trying to wipe out the enemy team. It's almost admirable how much effort went into making this feel like a real FPS. There are 3 classes to choose from: Assault, Sniper, and Shotgun. Both the shotgun and sniper felt like the gun actually fired quite some time after I pulled the trigger (or maybe I am just terrible at FPS games), so I stuck with the Assault class after the first dozen rounds. You also have a single frag grenade, a single flash bang, and a secondary pistol weapon that I never used. You can even ping locations for the other players (which would be helpful if they weren't actually just extremely well-voiced bots). Hysterically, there is a key bindings page in the settings menu.

You play as yourself, dropping into a match with 5 other players who are all ostensibly real-life friends of one another, making you the odd one out. Not only this, but voice chat is disabled until you have completed your first match, which means you are incapable of interacting directly with the other players. This essentially makes you the silent observer of everything that follows. The game starts normally enough: you jump in, you and your team face off against the enemy team, you win some, they win some, and you listen to your 5 teammates talk about things like their upcoming plans or favorite snacks. As the rounds progress, however, the game starts to behave oddly; the violence becomes more graphic, visual artifacts start appearing, voices of the other players start saying mean things to one another that the players claim they never said, and doors appear leading into the real-life rooms of the players.

That is as far as I am willing to spoil the game. The story that is told is one I think a lot of people can relate to on some level: about friend groups, how they change over time, and how no one really knows other people, especially people whom you only know online. But the story would be nothing without the phenomenal voice acting. The group they got to do the voices for the friend group sound exactly like a teen/young adult group of friends and exactly how you would expect them to sound going through the things they do. Their topics of conversation, the way they confront one another, the familiarity they they address each other with, they all absolutely nail the feeling that these are 5 people who are friends in real life who hop on and play games with one another regularly.

Beyond the voice acting, the graphics and sound design are great, and I don't say that ironically. The graphics for the FPS portions are bad on purpose because of the style of game it is emulating. However, when you step through into one of the other players' rooms, the graphics in those rooms are noticeably better to contrast with the bad graphics of your in-game avatar. It gives those rooms a much more realistic feel without needing to actually have crazy current-gen graphics. Likewise, there is no music to speak of over the entire runtime of the game. This is because the conversations among the other players is the core of the audio experience. It also makes the sudden audio cues when something abnormal happens stand out that much more. One of the first screens warns you that the game is better played with headphones, and I absolutely agree.

The only warnings I have for those interested in this game are some moral considerations. This game is not meant for young kids. There is a fair bit of swearing, with s**t, d**n, f**k, and their variants making several appearances each. Jesus' name is taken in vain one time that I noticed. The voice actors are all British, so there was even some British cussing in there, like someone being called a knobhead and another being called a w*nkstain. As far as violence goes, the graphics are pretty low quality, but blood shoots from the characters and their heads explode when they die. They also scream in pain, and squelching noises can be heard as they are shot. There is also one strange moment in someone's room where you can shoot their pet rat and it inflates until it explodes in a shower of blood. Finally, there is one scene during an argument between the other players where 3 of their avatars are shown crucified while a fourth looks on. There are no other religious undertones throughout the game, so I am unsure what the full intent was with this scene, but it's worth pointing out.

It Takes A War is a short but memorable experience; I finished the game in 56 minutes. It did a great job subverting expectations and it genuinely scared me once or twice. Considering you can buy this game at any price you feel it deserves from their itch.io page, you should definitely consider picking up a copy for yourself.

-maestro_dana