One Military Camp review – Great idea, Bland execution

One Military Camp is a management game where you train units to fight in a war. The idea was super compelling to me, especially since management games happen to be my second-favorite type of game. But One Military Camp is extremely bland, not only in the way the map looks but also in the gameplay. I fell asleep at least two times while playing this game, and it has been tough to revisit for this review. 

But that’s not to say the whole game is bad because it's not. There are tons of good systems baked in that make this game stand out and make it enjoyable to play. For example, I love that noise generation will disturb your troops and workers if they’re trying to rest after a long day. I also like that you can overload your power and have to manage it carefully. The different specializations are a standout too, and you can customize your army to your liking, for the most part. While the humor and story didn’t land for me because I found it to be almost too juvenile, I adore the character design and overall art design. It makes One Military Camp look unique in a good way. 

General Gameplay 

Some management games give you extremely interesting tasks to do and interact with. Take Jurassic World Evolution, for example. You can zoom in and watch the dinosaurs as they interact with their environment. You can take control of the staff to ensure tasks are completed. The maps are varied. It’s the same with games from the Two Point series. 

But One Military Camp has the bare minimum of things for you to watch. Yes, you can watch your soldiers training for the most part, but that’s it. The training process doesn’t lend itself to being very entertaining. If you’re expecting to watch your men and women fight, well, it doesn’t happen on the war map. I wasn’t too disappointed by this because I wasn’t expecting it. But I do wish there was something to engage with.

You get a lot of options to build with, train with, and decorate with, which I appreciate. Especially on the decoration front, because that tends to be ignored by these kinds of games. Decorations will increase your camp's aesthetics. There are entertainment options too, which you need to build to help generate some income. Options such as the cinema and museum add a touch of life to your camp, which I love. These buildings can generate noise, so it's best to keep them away from your houses and barracks because they will distract your troops and workers and keep people awake. 

Another management aspect that I like is that it is best to have people working day or night because you can run your workers into the ground. You have to make sure people rest; otherwise, they’re going to get sick. But you have to do this carefully because you can be attacked during the day and night, and people need to be able to respond to that. You can build security buildings to help negate these attacks.

Building with the joystick is best described as just okay. You can get the job done, and in general, the game doesn’t do too much to try and stop you from placing things where you want them to be. Be aware that the game doesn’t respond too well to fast movements. If I am placing a path down and go too quickly, it will start to try and build to the left or right without me using the joystick to navigate in that direction. 

Gameplay revolves around training your troops and sending them on missions. Everything else is shallow at best, and because you don’t really watch your troops fight, I found myself wondering what the point of what we’re doing was in the first place. As you beat missions, you work on clearing the map and getting more resources and revenue. The game never fails to remind you when an assigned activity is not suitable for a troop's training goal, which I found obnoxious. There is a sub-element here where you have to constantly purchase goods until you automate your camp, which becomes tedious. 

While watching your troops train is cool enough, I wish that there was something more to do. You’ll find that you will barely be interacting with the war map, even when managing the territories that you’ve taken back. In a way, this portion of the game feels unfleshed out and almost tacked on, which is bizarre because this is supposed to be a military management game. 

Training troops is fun, and while you can continue to advance them to become more specialized, it ultimately never feels like it mattered because of the way the battles work. You need specific troops to do specific missions. In a way, there is no strategy here, and if there is supposed to be a strategy, I never felt it. It constantly felt like I was waiting for soldiers to max their EXP, waiting for them to train to where they’re usable by the game's standards, waiting for things to be restocked. The list goes on and creates a very boring experience. 

Final Thoughts 

Like I said before, I really like how this game looks. It has a basic yet clean art style that I like works for what One Military Camp is. What I don’t like is how sloppy some of the designs seem to be, especially when it comes to the generals speaking. Animation seemed to have fallen by the wayside, which is a shame. 

One Military Camp has a lot of good ideas, especially in the way of smaller sub-systems. But the game falls flat where it matters, which is in the military aspect. Training soldiers and using them should’ve been the focal point of this game. Troops have cool specializations but feel underutilized and underdesigned. Base attacks do not happen as frequently as I would like, even in the sandbox where I have the option cranked up to the max.