Crush Your Enemies gives you the instructions in the title. You control a barbarian warlord tasked with crushing said enemies in this adorable RTS. It's not as stiff or methodical as other games in the genre, and a few tweaks on some typically conventional gameplay make Crush Your Enemies stand out.
Units are arranged in groups and each group can be divided up on the battlefield. Because the combat is so reactive this lends itself to a lot of quick decisions. You’ve got 100 enemies advancing but only 70 troops. Split them evenly? Try to fight one army at a time? Retreat and wait for reinforcements? All of these decisions happen quickly because Crush Your Enemies abandons the slow pace seen in similar games. Nothing in the demo at PAX East 2016 was especially difficult, but it was easy to see how the difficulty could ramp due to this faster pace.
“Initial idea was to have the experience of a real time strategy game but squeezed into a tight package,” said game designer Kacper Kwiatkowski. “So it doesn’t take much time to play. It doesn’t take much time to win a battle.”
Kwiatkowski estimates that the campaign will take about seven hours to complete when Crush Your Enemies releases later this year. But it will also include multiplayer for up to nine people, including crossplay. Considering the game will also be available on Android and iOS, this feature could add an active community for matchmaking. Kwiatkowski said the real draw for players is that Crush Your Enemies is a wholly original concept.
“We built it from the ground up. This isn’t just an iteration on a different game,” he said.
Crush Your Enemies is familiar enough that RTS fans like me can recognize at a glance what the basics are, but diving into the game for only a few minutes showed me that it plays much different than you’d expect. It’s tactical, but fast, and the range of unit types is what Kwiatkowski said is “the core” of the game. The way units counter each other, and how those counters get countered as players start splitting up their squads, leads to pitched battles that feel RTS-y but don’t require hours of set up. So what do you do when you find yourself surrounded on all sides by a variety of enemy troops? Easy … crush your enemies.
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