Vile Monarch’s Crush Your Enemies is not your traditional real-time strategy (RTS) game, but it certainly does a great job of condensing down the experience and making it more accessible for people who are short on extended periods of free time or who have short attention spans. The premise is simple and there’s next to no story to digest: you lead an unruly and uncouth army of archetypal barbarians, and your sole purpose is to conquer the fantasy world of Generia and—you guessed it—crush your enemies.
It’s a fast-paced and simple game, and it introduces you battle by battle to the mechanics, from controlling your troops to claiming territory to making use of different unit types. By fast-paced, though, I mean the seconds really count in each intense battle, and you can count on needing to concentrate and move fairly quickly until it’s over. Instead of spending a good part of your time building up strongholds and gathering resources, you can expect to focus mostly on actively commanding your troops and engaging the enemy, just about as soon as the timer starts. You can further speed up the action by pressing Y, but there’s no way to slow it down from the default pace if it’s too fast for you. You can also forget about pausing to queue up commands at your leisure (admittedly what I missed the most): you’ll instead get a taunting popup window blocking the view of the map.
As a result, victory or failure happens quickly: rather than spending a few hours on a battle, you can expect to spend maybe five to 15 frantic minutes on each. This compressed gameplay isn’t relaxing, but it’s really convenient for playing on the Switch as a portable console, and I’m able to squeeze in a game in the handfuls of minutes I manage to snatch between work and my toddler. I can imagine it’d be great for commuting on the train and other similar situations, too, especially since the controls are relatively straightforward, there’s not much you have to keep track of when not actively battling, and it’s easy enough to pick up where you left off.
Each battleground can also be attempted as many times as you like and meeting the bonus challenges at each (such as surviving for a set number of minutes or crushing your enemies with a certain minimum number of surviving units) grants you more reputation, which unlocks later levels. For players that have mastered the basics, Crush Your Enemies also has additional modes, including additional campaigns (the second campaign, for example, adds resources to the equation, such as needing meat to generate more units and wood to rebuild buildings), a local multiplayer Party mode, and online multiplayer that appears to be cross-platform. It’s nice that local multiplayer can be played on the Joy-Cons, too, so two players can have at it using the basic Switch system without buying additional peripherals.
That said, Crush Your Enemies was first released on PC, and though I’ve only had the opportunity to try the Switch version, I’m 99% sure it’d be easier to play with a mouse. Moving the cursor around with the Switch controller feels awkward and slow, and I often found when trying to move or split troops that I would accidentally deselect the unit I was trying to move or accidentally trigger the slider for the number of guys to move, costing me critical seconds. It can also be annoying to manually define a path for your units because movement goes by defined squares, and the Switch joystick doesn’t always precisely select the intended square, especially when I’m trying to move fast without the option to pause. If this was a slower-paced traditional RTS, it might not be a problem to cancel the mistake and reenter the command, but where every second matters, it can be frustrating to blow the whole encounter because the controls aren’t the easiest to use.
This obstacle aside, Crush Your Enemies is an entertaining diversion that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and I enjoyed the comically overblown art style (Muk with an exploded bird on his face got an unexpected laugh out of me), retro pixel graphics, and Celtic-inspired soundtrack. Note that the humor is frequently macho and full of inappropriate jokes and curse words, so it may not be your cup of tea if you’re easily offended or have young ones about that can read, but it fits the generally irreverent flavor of the game to a T. If you’re intrigued by the idea of an RTS on fast-forward and don’t mind a bit of rude, tongue-in-cheek humor, this game’s a steal at $8 at the time of this writing (less than the cost of a sandwich around where I live) and worth checking out.
