Otherwar at times is a brilliant combination of tower defence and bullet hell genres, the rest of the time it’s a monotonous slog that offers players little in exchange for their time and money.
Singleplayer.
Otherwar looks fantastic, and while pixel art games are not for everyone, I feel that the aesthetic is perfect for low-budget indie titles, as it allows developers to focus their limited resources on making a better game, which can also include more variety of enemies, with 2D pixel art sprites frequently being easier and cheaper to animate than their 3D counterparts.
While the creepy-as-hell UI isn’t my cup of tea, it is incredibly well-made and helps to immerse the player in the bleak world of Otherwar.
Otherwar, by attempting to combine the tower defence and bullet hell genres as becomes a jack of all trades and master of none, and the final result is a substandard bullet hell title with elements of a barely average tower defence game.
While I commend the developer for this attempt at fusing genres, in the case of Otherwar, it hasn’t worked, and it is unlikely to appeal to fans of either genre.
Otherwar does offer a fair bit of challenging content; unfortunately, this is all front-loaded, and level 1 as a new player is much harder to complete than level 9 as a fully upgraded character. As a result, the more a player invests their time in Otherwar, the less enjoyable it becomes.
By the time I reached the first mission of the third zone (level 7 of 9), I could obliterate all enemies well before they had come into range of my turrets by pointing my corner at the spawn point and holding down the mouse button.
This resulted in a roughly 20-minute period of doing nothing but occasionally swapping which spawn point I was aiming at and reading Reddit on my phone; during this period of limited attention, I lost only one life due to a short period when I grew so bored of playing Otherwar that I actually forgot I was still doing so and took my hand off the mouse entirely.
This starkly contrasts the earlier levels, where I needed to fully focus on the game if I hoped to complete the mission, let alone finish it with a perfect score.
Due to each mission having three difficulties and a possible 3-star rating, completionists can squeeze 27 levels out of Otherwar’s relatively sparse content.
However, once you have gained access to a few upgrades for your angel and unlocked all available towers, Otherwar turns into the world’s most annoying idle game, one that requires you to either constantly fire at spawn points (killing enemies before they can fire), or move around the map avoiding the slowest and least engaging bullet hell projectiles I have yet to encounter in any game.
Otherwar offers a fairly comprehensive upgrade system, which makes combat far more enjoyable for a short while before a total lack of balancing takes hold, and players can singlehandedly defeat entire waves of enemies without taking a hit.
Otherwar is a management video game developed by Kantal Collective and published by Hyperstrange S.A., it was released on 27 February 2023 and retails for $5.09.
Otherwar is available exclusively on PC.
On average Otherwar takes between 6 and 8 hours to complete.
Estimated completion times are derived from various sources and may vary based on the skill level of each player.
The following peripherals are officially supported:
Otherwar is unrated and contains:
Otherwar is not a bad game, and it has moments of brilliance; however, they are few and far between, and by the time I reached the end of my time with Otherwar, I was ready to put it behind me for good.
