Military sims are a dime a dozen, but none quite like One Military Camp, a game hailing from Barcelona-based Abylight Studios. This isn’t one of those army simulators with fierce real-time strategic battles, or a mobile city-builder where the ultimate goal is to reach into your wallet and strip you off your hard-earned cash; One Military Camp is a real game, one that will test your management skills and make you laugh at the same time, even as your recruits fail miserably in often amusing ways.

Full Metal Jackass

The first thing that hits you when you play One Military Camp is just how confident and striking the game looks. The art style is top notch, pretty much on par with what Electronic Arts has offered us throughout the years in The Sims. You can freely rotate and zoom the map, providing complete freedom for any player who isn’t too comfortable with the default top-down isometric perspective.

But what absolutely takes the cake is the characters’ animations. These little misfits will go through all the motions, from their lofty but inadequate ambitions as they get enrolled until they finally specialize in some of the top-tier areas. Watching each one as they train or perform their duties around the camp and comically fumble up even the humblest of tasks is a fun way of spending time waiting for a task to end, particularly when the animation is this superb and nearly worthy of an army bloopers video.

With a considerable assortment of buildings to place in your previously deserted military base, each one has a functionality that will make your privates interact in corresponding ways. The ensuing chaos can be a great time-killer, such as a private reading a book and stumbling from their chair, or another one punching the boxing speed bag and getting hit back. If you pay enough attention, you can see the recruits doing basic needs in their accommodations, with the respective sound effect included, to much surprise and some puerile chuckling. Even the animations where everything goes according to plan are a joy to watch and not something I was fully expecting from a military city-builder strategy game – color me pleasantly surprised and throw me into that shark pool.

Despite the silly looks and unfathomable shenanigans, there’s no time to waste in One Military Camp, as you have an army to assemble if you plan on facing the threat that is the despicable Dragan. You start by sorting the endless stream of eager recruits according to their main traits and pointing them to the appropriate areas. From lowly privates to medics, maintenance personnel, chefs, security, and researchers, these are the entry jobs for everyone who steps into the recruitment center. Assigning units to buildings will increase their stats through intensive training, and the more tiers they climb, the longer it will take to hit the required stat levels. Add to this logistics, resource management, diseases, morale levels, enemy spies bombing your facilities… there’s a lot to keep you busy and on edge, even if we get alerts about events that aren’t going smoothly.

That’s the thing with One Military Camp – it is a time-consuming game, even if you thoughtlessly resort to the fast-forward function. This isn’t advised, as micro-management is a certainty and your well-meaning recruits are for the most a clueless bunch. You need to instruct them to go to the building where their specialization training is available, point them in the direction of their barracks or homes if they were built after the rookies’ enlistment, but the worst part is having to tell the injured soldiers to go to the clinic, or they will simply limp their way around the camp until leaving for good due to a serious medical condition. Going deep into management aspects is one thing, but depriving your minions of this type of autonomy is going a little bit too far and makes some tasks aggravating in the long run.

The campaign has clear goals for you to achieve, so it’s not like you will be advancing blind. On the other hand, missions task you with advancing your recruits according to some specializations, and then it’s time to compare forces and send them into the main map for a series of additional rewards, money included. As you watch your balance drop and the income falls in the red, taking a loan can help you keep afloat or end up making things worse. This is a difficult game, and you will be frustrated when power failures occur or you recurrently lack the ammo for training your privates, but just as it happens with the little recruits, you will also learn and adapt.

Setting up a research lab will give you access to the tech tree, where you can unlock and advance various categories, making your job slightly easier. Increasing training speed or the number of maintenance workers is just a couple of boosts that you shouldn’t neglect, but there’s a lot more to research.

Military Evil Genius

While in some sense we can point fingers to One Military Camp’s overly demanding management, the UI is assembled in a neat and organized fashion, displaying a considerable amount of information in a way that is easy on the eyes. It will take some time to find all the buttons and you may wonder why some options are not available, such as repositioning or rotating buildings after the original placement, but that’s a small price to pay for a deep, engaging, and above all fun strategy game.

Another shortcoming is the lack of interactivity during the dispatch missions, with a progress bar that feels underwhelming when you could potentially command your reckless soldiers in turn-based strategic warfare, for example. Eventually, One Military Camp may grow and overcome a few flaws, with the roadmap including a sandbox mode, among other things.

Inherently slow-paced but occasionally very enjoyable, One Military Camp is a challenging and visually stunning strategy army sim in the vein of Evil Genius and other management games. It’s polished beyond measure, extremely fun to poke around, and worthy of our unofficial but entirely befitting The Sims: You’re in the Army Now sticker.

Score: 8/10

Pros:

• Beautiful and often hilarious character animations
• Complex and challenging management
• Great longevity

Cons:

• Could do without some extreme micro-management
• Map missions are a plain progress bar

One Military Camp review code provided by publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.