Eyes of War

My first honest reaction to Eyes of War was a small burst of excitement followed by a longer period of squinting at the screen wondering if anything was actually finished. The central idea is the kind of thing RTS veterans have wanted for years: you run your top-down castle-building economy, raise an army of swordsmen, archers, and cavalry across four distinct factions, then at any moment you drop into a third-person action view and personally fight with one of your grunts while the rest of the battle carries on around you. Switching between soldiers is handled by pressing E in the direction of a nearby unit, and when it clicks, there is a genuine rush to it. You are the architect and the wrecker at the same time. There are three modes to keep you busy. Strategy is the full loop: build your castle, harvest resources, queue up your army, and destroy the enemy base with up to four players online or against AI. Battle skips the economy entirely, letting you compose a force of over 200 units from any faction and throw them at an opposing army, Total War-style, which is where the character-possession hook shines brightest because the stakes of each individual fight feel real. Arena is a smaller 2v2 bracket mode where you draft units round by round. None of the three modes overstay their welcome, partly because the content depth is shallow enough that you run out of things to discover faster than you would like. The problems are real and not small. The AI in Strategy mode can flood the map with numbers but cannot string together a coherent attack, so you end up kiting units and exploiting brain-dead pathfinding rather than playing actual strategy. Line-of-sight handling has been widely criticized as broken: walls give you no visibility bonus, fog of war has had persistent rendering bugs (a post-launch patch specifically fixed a fog memory leak and blue-tinted darkness), and enemy siege weapons can pepper your walls from angles you cannot counter. Unit production is slow enough that by the time you have a half-decent force, the AI already has a full castle and three armies en route. Visually the maps are sparse, buildings lack texture detail, and pop-in is visible when you switch to character mode and look into the distance. Steam users have also reported Unity engine crashes on launch, cursor-loss bugs in Survivor mode, and faction lock issues in skirmish. That said, the community reception sits at roughly 78 percent positive on Steam across over 260 reviews, which tells you the audience it found is genuinely forgiving and genuinely engaged. Post-launch patches have addressed pathfinding, multiplayer sync, memory usage, and rendering stability, so the game is meaningfully better than it was at 1.0 launch in January 2025. Multiplayer with human opponents is where the possession mechanic earns its keep, because reading which grunt suddenly moves with human intelligence and trying to duel them in a hundred-man brawl is the kind of moment no traditional RTS can produce. The Linux build also runs natively, which is worth flagging if that matters to you. Bottom line: the skeleton of a compelling hybrid genre experiment is here, and the developers appear to be patching actively. But the RTS fundamentals are too thin and the AI too hollow to hold up a solo session for long. Buy it to play with friends who are in the same mental space as you, or wait for another six months of patches and content additions before expecting it to hold its own against the genre's benchmarks.

Fred · Scout Team

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