Battle for Wesnoth (2005)

Wesnoth is legitimately one of my favorite games of all time. I've just lost so many hours to playing through campaigns or even skirmishes. The art is incredible, the sound is captivating, the battle animations are stupendous, the different factions and units are clever, the campaigns are (for the most part) wonderful, and it's just....fun.

For the poor, unfortunate (or fortunate, after coming across this review!) souls who have never heard of Battle for Wesnoth, it is a turn-based hexagonal strategy game based on fantasy characters and settings. It has many different factions -such as humans, elves, undead, and etc- which have different characters of different classes: physical combat, ranged, or magic. Recruiting units is done with money, part of which you start out with and others you must gain by capturing and holding villages. Your characters can all level up and increase and power over the course of an entire campaign, but recalled units cost more gold. You also have special units, particularly your "main" dude that is the one that is used to recruit all other units and cannot be killed- your chess King, if you will.

There are further gameplay mechanics that make it even more interesting: different units move differently and receive attack & defense benefits from the different varieties of ground. Different factions receive bonuses for day (good) and night (evil), while dusk and dawn are neutral. And the best part is that none of these mechanics are confusing. Wesnoth does an amazing job of displaying everything in an extremely simple manner.

Another thing Wesnoth does extremely well is that the campaign scenarios are not all "defeat the enemy". Some have you move to a certain place on the map while being chased. Others require you to defeat a certain enemy before its comrades can sweep in for reinforcements. Others still give you CPU allies. And others just throw 5 enemy teams against you and somehow expect you to win. It will kick your ass in all 6 directions. The different difficulties in terms of campaigns and CPU difficulties make it a game where you can continually become better and better at. Really, you have to. This is not a "free, but 4 hours of gameplay." This is hundreds of hours of challenging scenarios. There are even tons of fan-made campaigns, most of which are fairly rough in terms of being unfinished, but the ones that are finished are worthy of being shipped with the game and sometimes even add whole new factions and elements to the game. Want to create your own? You can. I haven't, but from what I hear it's easy to do. I mean, if you're good at the art and the sound and the thinking and stuffs.

Battle for Wesnoth has and always will be a game that I gush over because I love it that much. Partly because best of all: it's open source. Not just free, but literally created by people contributing their time and talent to the code and assets. How absolutely lovely is that? The end result is a fantastic game. And what's more: a fantastic game that is always improving.

The system requirements are ridiculously low (sans a couple gigs of drive space). I've played it on an ASUS EEE PC Netbook and even an iPod Touch. It's available on all platforms so when getting a new computer, I almost always download it the day I first boot up. Why? Because it's fun and you can play it any time. You can play a few turns before class or even on the bus, or sit down and marathon a few scenarios when winding down at night.

I'm rambling, but as I said: I gush. It just a great, great game and I would sincerely recommend it to anyone who likes video games.