Crush Your Enemies is a textbook example of “don’t judge a book by its cover” in practice. It looks a little underwhelming — with its cartoony barbarian art and doofy storyline about a bunch of meathead warriors conquering all who face them. When I first looked at it, I admit, I didn’t expect all that much.
But the game itself — a speedy, light RTS that has you shifting units around a grid-based battlefield — is actually fantastic.
Every stage is a neatly contained warzone. You and your adversary often start with similar resources — a small army or two, a couple of specialized “buildings” like training huts for turning troops into, well, different kinds of troops (including archers, stronger warriors, shield bearers, etc. all with their own attributes), and your own territory to manage. Your little dudes move slowly on the enemy land, slowly turning it your color as you traverse the battlefield — while they do the same to yours.
Crush Your Enemies tasks you with fairly heavy multitasking right away. You need to manage those units quickly and efficiently, taking over enemy territory and killing every adversary on the map. Else, you’ll be the one who gets crushed.
There are alternative goals on each stage — finishing with a certain number of troops, or crushing particular buildings, etc. all of which earns you ‘respect’ — the game’s version of XP, really. More respect means you can make your way to new missions.
There are challenge stages as well, all of which seemed more difficult than the story missions, and all of which yielded beer — a sort of currency you can use to buy items to boost your troops on the battlefield.
It’s pretty basic for an RTS, but it moves FAST and requires you to think faster. Do you need strong warriors to beat up a huge army of peasants? Do they have any watchtowers that you might need shieldbearers to weather? Or could you get to that watchtower faster with speedy scouts, take it over and rain down arrows on your foes? Every action has a reasonable counter for both you and your opponent, and you need to figure out the optimal path to victory lickedy-split.
Thankfully, screwing up means you only need to weather a rude message (no, game, I am not an Elvish preschooler, thank you very much) and you can reset immediately. Most missions are fairly short affairs, so I never felt bad taking a few stabs at an optimal strategy before setting in on an approach and really giving it my all. It plays like a puzzle game in this way, never really punishing you for knocking over the board and trying something really wacky.
After a few matches, I found myself hooked — and obsessed with getting every challenge goal. I certainly messed up often, particularly at first. But that was never really an issue. Once I found my rythmn, I had a hard time closing the window and quitting for more than an hour or two. I played it on my laptop, and carried the game from room to room with me, cursing at tiny barbarian guys as my real-life pets looked at me funny.
Crush Your Enemies is a deceptively awesome little package. I’m not an RTS pro, but it had me micromanaging my tiny troops and planning moves on the battlefield like a respectable armchair general. It’s a no-fuss, lean, and lightning quick taste of strategy, well worth a look even if the goofy faux-Viking theme does nothing for you.
