Design your own epic battles and watch as the opposing armies are trying their best to outsmart the enemies or join the fighter ranks yourself and help your allies on the battlefield.
Ancient Warfare 3 is a battle simulation game made primarily with sandbox play in mind. The game revolves around creating a variety of scenarios focused on battles between the two rival armies.
There’s no clear goal in the game, which means you should focus on doing what brings you the most joy and puts your creative mind to use.
Think of all the crazy war scenarios you can imagine and try to recreate your unique ideas in Ancient Warfare 3. Watch how they play out and which side gains the advantage.
Combine hundreds of types of soldiers and vehicles from different eras or even create your very own units; it’s one of those games where the sky – and your creativity – are the limit.
If you want to learn more about the game, here’s our short Ancient Warfare 3 review where we take a look at its most important features.
Gameplay
Ancient Warfare 3 focuses on allowing you to bring to life your craziest ideas in terms of armed conflicts, although in a rather silly and light-hearted form. You can pick the battlefield and place the troops and objects such as traps and equipment pieces, choosing from hundreds of different units with their own stats and behavior.
The units belong to several different eras, which means that you can easily simulate battles that involve medieval knights with their plate armors and trusty swords, tanks taken out straight from the Second World War, and futuristic soldiers equipped with laser guns. And if that’s not enough, you can add more types of units made by other people, thanks to the integration with Steam Workshop, or you can even make your own.
Once everything is set up or one of the pre-made scenarios is chosen, you can start the battle, where you have two options: join the battle and control one of the characters on the battlefield in order to assist your team and help your army win, or just become a spectator and watch how the computer controls both parties and utilizes a range of strategies to ensure the creation of an entertaining show full of action and unexpected twists.
As one of the soldiers, you’ll be able to freely move around the battlefield, use your weapon to dispose of the enemy horde, pick up weapons dropped by the fallen soldiers, and interact with various objects, including stationary weapons.
At its core, Ancient Warfare 3 is a casual and stress-free experience that’s a perfect choice to unwind and relax after a taxing day.
Graphics
The game features a clean and sterile visual art style with a limited color palette, resulting in high visual clarity. Units of both teams are easy to tell apart in the heat of the battle by their red and blue elements even from a considerable distance. The simple, blocky low-poly look has some appeal to it and complements the silly nature of the game, where you can create some ridiculous scenarios to play and enjoy.
Story
The game is entirely focused on the gameplay part, where players create and play their own scenarios in which opposing armies are trying to defeat each other on the battlefield.
As such, the game doesn’t have a story and instead encourages players to fully immerse into the unique sandbox experience with an unparalleled amount of freedom.
Game Modes and Features
The game comes with several fun game modes to try, among which you’ll find deathmatch, conquest, king of the hill, and zombie survival.
They’re pretty much self-explanatory and similar to what you’d find in other similar types of games focused on battles between rival armies. It makes it easier to jump right into action if you ever played games from similar genres, as Ancient Warfare 3 follows a similar set of rules.
The amount of extra game modes and high content variety extends the game’s longevity and adds some value to the title’s replayability, bringing everyone a chance to find something they’ll enjoy.
Customization
Customization is one of the biggest strengths of Ancient Warfare 3 and it’s a potential source of unlimited fun for creative minds, as long as you’re willing to learn.
The most obvious layer of customization lies in making your own scenarios, where you can place units and objects of your choice on the map and assign them to two rival armies in order to create a fair – or particularly unfair, whatever suits your fancy – environment in which the forces will clash. You can also create your own maps, place buildings, and construct more advanced creations. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Ancient Warfare 3 comes with its own built-in scripting engine, which means that you can not only choose the units participating in your custom scenarios but also control their behavior and the flow of the entire encounter through the clever use of scripts to make things more exciting and unpredictable.
Scripting itself is not difficult and it comes with a clear, user-friendly graphic interface where you’re not coding by writing the instructions, but rather connecting various logic blocks to create a set of conditions that, when met, trigger different actions.
If you have ever programmed in any language, you’ll quickly figure out how scripting here works, as it largely follows the same principles. Otherwise, you may need some extra time to familiarize yourself with the basic programming concepts before diving into AW3 scripting.
However, in both cases, it’s still recommended to watch some tutorial videos on the topic of in-game scripting, as it has some caveats you should be aware of. It’s also good to learn beforehand what can be made with the use of scripts, what is possible and what are the limits.
Music and Sounds
Ancient Warfare 3 music is not exactly the reason you’d play the game for, but it’s a nice little addition that adds some drama and tension to the action on the battlefield. The choice of music is very limited, but the tracks build some kind of atmosphere that may add to the overall experience.
You’ll be hearing a simple orchestral piece with some sense of epicness being woven into it, which may be a great fit if your battles consist primarily of medieval units, but may feel a bit out of place once you start incorporating more modern units into your scenarios.
The sounds of weapons and environments are pretty basic and generic but they’re not distracting and do not negatively influence the experience. For a simple, gameplay-heavy game such as this, they’re good enough.
User Interface
The user interface is clear, simple, and intuitive, and this goes for all parts of the game, from the editor for making custom scenarios, to participating in battles and writing scripts.
When on the battlefield, the UI will be limited to showing just the most basic stats of your character, which are health and the amount of ammunition left for the currently held weapon.
The rest of the screen is completely free of UI elements with the exception of pop-up texts that indicate a possibility of interaction with a nearby object. As such, the player is not bombarded with information and can fully focus on the actual gameplay.
Community
The game has a dedicated, friendly community that consists of regular players as well as modders of varying skill levels, doing their best to add extra content for others to try once they get bored with the vanilla experience.
This includes not only thousands of extra units to utilize on the battlefield but also countless completely new fan-made scenarios that can be easily downloaded and launched with no hassle, thanks to the integration with the Steam Workshop.
Pros and Cons
As a short summary of what the game does well and what could use some extra work to make the experience better, here’s a list of some of the Ancient Warfare 3 pros and cons.
Pros:
- Fun, lighthearted sandbox experience
- Encourages experimenting and trying out new things, which increases replayability
- Extremely customizable, especially if you can use scripting efficiently
- Built-in editors for maps, units, and action scripts
- Simple but pleasant 3D low-poly visuals with a limited number of colors for better clarity
- Clean, minimalistic UI
- A wide choice of game modes to try
- Hundreds of units, objects, and equipment pieces are available right away
- Extra fan-made content through Steam Workshop
Cons:
- Music and sounds are rather lackluster
- Can be laggy and choppy – mass battles are pretty much out of reach
- Shines brightly if you know how to script; otherwise, you’re missing out on a lot of potential fun
- Requires a creative mind to make the most out of the game
- Computer-controlled units are not the sharpest tools in the shed and easily trigger obvious traps
Conclusion
Ancient Warfare 3 is a surprisingly addictive simple-looking game that can get extremely complex if you want to, thanks to the built-in editors that allow players to fine-tune the experience to their liking through the use of custom scripts.
The issue is that if you’re not creative enough to make your own interesting scenarios or you’re not familiar with programming, your fun in the game will be drastically limited, as you’ll be able to, at most, make a map and place the units on it, but you won’t be able to control the behaviors. There’s still tons of fun in it, though, and you can always rely on the modding community to provide you with extras.