Make War

My spreadsheet instincts lit up when I first read the premise of Make War: you are an alien with access to the march of time, dropping troops and weapons into real historical conflicts to tip the outcome. Vikings versus Romans, WWII engagements, cyberpunk skirmishes, each era bringing its own loadout of tools. That is a genuinely clever scaffold for a tactics-sandbox. The execution, unfortunately, is a lesson in how quickly an interesting idea can be undercut by the details around it. The core loop is pre-battle placement. Before a fight kicks off, you position alien units and gadgets across the field, then hit start and watch the chaos unfold. Objectives vary across the campaign: push one side to victory, rack up a kill quota, drag the battle past a time limit. That variety is welcome, and the better moments come when you figure out a clever combination, luring enemy platoons into a choke point for your snipers, or using a slowing device to buy time for a flanking group of basic warriors. The reset button, which lets you wipe the setup and try again without sitting through the whole fight, is a small but sensible quality-of-life touch that shows the developers understood the sandbox spirit. The problems stack up fast, though. AI pathing is the biggest one. Ground units operate on a "charge the nearest enemy" directive, which sounds fine in theory but falls apart the moment a stray patrol re-routes your carefully staged ambush by running in the wrong direction. Planning a multi-step trap feels satisfying right up until a random unit collision undoes it. For a strategy game, that is a foundational issue, not a quirk you adapt around. The English localisation also carries noticeable grammatical errors throughout, which matters more here than in an action game, because challenge objectives that read ambiguously can make you fail missions you had no way of interpreting correctly. Steam user sentiment sits at a mixed 54 percent across a small sample, and that feels about right. There is a functional, low-budget tactics sandbox in here with a fun sci-fi framing and enough era variety to hold attention for a few hours. The voxel aesthetic is functional rather than pretty, closer to early Minecraft than anything polished, but it reads clearly on the battlefield. There are no mods, no multiplayer, no deep progression system. This is a snack, not a meal. If you are the kind of player who enjoys setting up physics-sandbox dominoes and watching the results, Make War scratches that itch at a very low asking price. If you need reliable AI, clean localisation, or anything resembling late-game strategic depth, go elsewhere. Diego, Scout Team

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