Crush Your Enemies Review

Enter a world where barbarians have one thing on their mind – well actually several things on their mind, including: beer, inappropriate language, women, beer, plundering, conquering, beer, and beer. Crush Your Enemies is a strategy game that takes you through several types of battle scenarios with one thing in mind, well okay, on top of the beer and stuff, and that’s conquering your enemies by crushing them into fertilizer to apparently grow grass of different colors. It’s sort of like Splatoon 2, in that as you gain new territory the grass turns to your color.

The point of the game is to take a starting number of men and capture land from those you wish to conquer. The scenarios require various strategies and gameplay mechanics that will have you beginning the campaign with many smaller groups of men and pulling them together to start recruiting. You then have many options, including transferring them to the training barracks, moving them into fortresses, taking over territory, or attacking the enemies. It’s a very straightforward game at its core, but it does feature some extra goals that make it more difficult than just moving your armies around to take over each game board. Some of these challenges include finishing the level in less than 2 minutes, crushing your enemies, and having a minimum number of barbarians left at the end.

The game board is laid out as a grid with various paths you can take to defeat your foes. If you’re familiar with the strategy genre, Crush Your Enemies is a much more simplified and streamlined experience than most other games. This allows for quicker matches while on the go. To move your units you simply use the left controls tick and click on the group of barbarians you want to direct. You can then hold a button down to create a path for them to follow or simply click on the units and then click on the spot you want them to move and they’ll get to it. Unfortunately the developers totally screwed up the controls and it’s very difficult to manage your barbarians. The controls aren’t precise and more often than not I’d try to draw a path of where I’d want them to go only to have an adjacent square get highlighted instead. When there’s a timer counting down for you to hit to get the best rating, it becomes increasingly frustrating. This could have been remedied by allowing the use of the “d-pad” buttons instead of the analog stick, but for some reason they didn’t utilize that option.

There really is no story to speak of with the game, it’s just cutscenes that try to be funny while teaching you how to play through the monotony. There is no voice acting in the game. The characters, which are actually drawn very well and have a nice art style, just make noises like the animals in Animal Crossing. There is one specific character whose “voice” just drove me crazy to the point that I started skipping the cinemas when he would start talking.

They do add obstacles to the grid to try to spice up the gameplay and to keep levels unique and fresh. You’ll come across marshes that make your armies move slower, starting out with not even close to enough barbarians and needing to talk to neutral barbarians so they will join you in your cause, or different buildings that can enhance your little army here and there. If you like games along the line of Angry Birds where you just pick it up, maybe play through a few scenarios, and then forget about it for a few days then you may enjoy playing this one.

Crush Your Enemies has a cool concept and I can see there being a market for it. If you are looking for something to pass the time while during a bio-break or sitting in the waiting room of your dentist’s office, then this may interest you. There are a plethora of better strategy games available that have way more content for just a little higher price that make more sense for most Switch owners. In the end I can’t really recommend this one – the controls really sink any potential it might have had.

Review Guidelines & Scoring

Crush Your Enemies was reviewed using a final retail Nintendo Switch download code provided by the publisher.

Jay Kittelson

Jay has been an avid gamer since the Intellivision days.  His hobbies include building PCs, 3D modeling and printing, and spending time with his children and dog.