War Selection is borrowing heavily from late ’90s and early 2000s historic real-time strategy games. The most famous touchstone is Age of Empires, but War Selection is definitely more Empire Earth or Rise of Nations. Your civilization starts out in the Stone Age and you can advance it all the way up to the Modern Age, choosing a few paths along the way. After spending a few hours in the Sandbox mode I can say that this part of the game is coming along well even in early access. However, the other major part of War Selection‘s sales pitch is the massive “battle royale” style online matches that promise to feature up to 62 players. This is where things get a little murky at this point in time.
Let’s start with the gameplay as this is where I see the most promise. The game looks, feels, and even progresses very much like those turn-of-the-century RTS games. I played a lot of those back in the day, so I was able to pick up what War Selection was putting down. However, if you’re new to this type of game you may have a hard time getting started. At this point there is no tutorial and the UI leaves a lot to be desired. These types of games haven’t been popular for almost two decades, so newcomers may have a hard time figuring out how to progress. That said, once I personally got rolling I felt right at home.
The Sandbox mode is the only single player content currently available and basically serves as a “figure it out yourself” tutorial. You can figure out most of it by simply clicking around and reading tooltips. Again, this is pretty basic stuff for the genre, but not explained well within the game. Luckily, the pace of the sandbox mode allows you to spend as much time as you want poking around. It really only exists right now to teach yourself the ropes, and it serves that purpose well.
The other part of the sales pitch here is the massive multiplayer battles. In theory it sounds great. Put dozens of players on a massive map, each choosing their own technology path, and see who comes out on top. War Selection seems to have the basic framework to make that happen, but the only thing you can’t program into a game is a player base to fill matches. This seems to be where the game is struggling at the moment. I wasn’t able to get into any of these matches unfortunately. You can make a private match with friends, but every time I tried matchmaking it would either queue me forever or throw me into a match with AI.
As a fan of the genre I am very excited to see where War Selection goes from here. There is definitely a solid foundation for a classic historic RTS to grow from. If a healthy player base can be maintained the potential for the huge multiplayer battles is limitless. While it’s a little disappointing that there isn’t a little bit more here right now, it’s hard to not recommend folks check it out for themselves considering it is free.
