This War of Mine
BANGER · Strategy · 2014
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $19.99.
- Length
- 11.3h
- Value
- $1.77/hr
- Reviews
- 94% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 2 GB of memory, GeForce GTX 260, Radeon HD 5770, 1024 MB, Shader Model 3.0. Runs on Windows, Linux.
In This War Of Mine you do not play as an elite soldier, rather a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city; struggling with lack of food, medicine and constant danger from snipers and hostile scavengers. The game provides an experience of war seen from an entirely new angle.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
June 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $0.99. It has been discounted 104 times in the 12 years tracked here, typically at 80 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Against its own genre it lands in the top 1 percent on value. It is pricier than 92 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 98 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Frostpunk 2 ($22.49, scores 47) and IXION ($34.99, scores 51).
$44.17 is where it would stop being a BANGER. Today it is $19.99.
The press gave it 83; the people who bought it give it 94 percent. An 11-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data puts 23 percent of players at this game's ending achievement. The median game this site can measure sits at 8. 8 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written May 2025 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,409 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 82 percent of the 5,348 reviews written there were positive, against 94 percent overall, and those are 7 percent of everything written about it. It sells extras on top of the sticker price (cosmetic); the score docks it lightly for that.
Finishing takes 11.3 hours; clearing it takes 47, which is 4.1 times the campaign.
Still 756 concurrent players, 12 years in.
The drop-off
72% start to 23% finishA normal fall-off for a game this long. Steam global achievements
Players
756 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I LOVE THIS GAME / I LOVE 11BIT STUDIOS / YOU NEED TO BUY ALL EXPANSIONS AND PLAY THIS Full Explanation: This War Of Mine is loosely inspired from the siege of Sarajevo, a brutal battle that claimed the lives of thousands with children even being deliberately targeted by sniper fire many times during this conflict. With the siege of Sarajevo as a loose inspiration, This War Of Mine hammers home the reality that, in...
An absolute emotional blender that forces you to make gut-wrenching survival choices while civilian life crumbles around you. Scavenging for canned food at night while dodging snipers makes every single victory feel depressingly hollow. It's a brilliant, heavy-hitting masterpiece that I can only bring myself to play when I want to feel thoroughly devastated.
Can be unintentionally goofy at times, but still it treated it's subject seriously enough to give me nightmares
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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This War of Mine scores 89/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/282070/this-war-of-mineThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.