Crush Your Enemies wants a fight, not a treaty. Vile Monarch built a real-time strategy game that strips out diplomacy, long repositioning turns and the waiting that drags the genre down. What is left is barbarians, chest hair and a lot of swearing. Good Shepherd Entertainment and Vile Monarch handled publishing.
Trailer, via Good Shepherd Entertainment.
Foul-Mouthed Barbarians, No Diplomacy
The pitch is simple. Crush Your Enemies is an RTS cut to the basics, and the studio leans into that. The theme is action, history and comedy, with warfare and party energy running through it.
The game plays from a bird’s-eye, isometric view. It runs on single player and multiplayer, so you can play alone or take the fight to someone else.
That is the whole offer. Just foul-mouthed barbarians and more chest hair than you can handle.
Where Crush Your Enemies Actually Runs
The platform spread is unusually wide for an indie strategy game. Crush Your Enemies shipped on:
- Linux
- Android
- PC (Microsoft Windows)
- iOS
- Mac
- Nintendo Switch
The source lists those platforms and identifies the game as a 2016 release. It does not give a launch date for each one, so the spread should be read as a list of supported systems, not a claim that every version arrived at once.
That reach is the most interesting thing about the release. A game this lean can live on a phone, a laptop and a Switch without changing shape, and few strategy titles manage that.
The 6.6 Problem
The critical aggregate sits at 6.6 out of 10, drawn from eight outlets. That number is fair, and it is also a little damning.
Crush Your Enemies does exactly what it promises. It removes the stuffiness, the endless repositioning, the waiting. In this paper’s view, the waiting is the real villain here, and the game’s answer to it is the best thing it does. But stripping a genre to the bone leaves a game that, on our reading, has nowhere to go once the joke lands.
The comedy carries the early going. Gratuitous use of “bollocks” is a selling point the studio put on the box itself. Past that, the barbarians and the chest hair are doing the same work they did at the start, and the isometric skirmishes settle into a rhythm you have already solved.
This is not a failure of execution. It is a failure of ambition. Vile Monarch set out to make a small, loud, fast strategy game, and it made one. We think the multiplayer is where it holds up best, against a human opponent, where the stripped-down rules stop feeling thin and start feeling sharp. Against the computer, the thinness shows.
The 6.6 is the correct score. In our assessment, Crush Your Enemies works as a palate cleanser between bigger strategy games, not a replacement for them. It is worth the download on whatever device you already own, and it is worth putting down when the joke wears out.
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