War Against Children

Getting Started With War Against Children

I first ran into this project about a year ago when someone on a gaming forum posted a breakdown of the core mechanics. The basic idea is that you're controlling a defensive force trying to protect a perimeter while waves of hostile units push inward. It's top-down, it has some roguelike elements baked in, and the difficulty curve is steep. Not necessarily in a good way. Here is what I actually found after putting in roughly forty hours across two full playthroughs.

The Download Situation

You can grab it from the developer's official page or the itch.io listing. I went with the itch version because the standalone launcher kept crashing on my machine. The game is free, no payment wall, no microtransactions. Just download and install. Takes about three minutes on a decent connection. Extract the zip file to any folder you want. Run the .exe from the root directory. Do not put it in Program Files unless you are okay with fighting Windows permissions the rest of your life. On launch, you will get a settings screen before the main menu. This is important. I spent my first run ignoring it and ended up with text so small I could not read the unit labels. Go into settings first. Crank the UI scale to at least 125 percent. Set your keybinds to something comfortable. Default WASD works but the movement feels tighter if you bind sprint to Shift instead of holding it with your pinky. The game runs on a wave system. Each wave gets harder, introducing new enemy types and faster spawn rates. Between waves you get a short window to spend points on upgrades. There are three branches: offense, defense, and utility. Most players dump everything into offense early because it feels satisfying to blow things up. That is a mistake.

The defense branch gives you structural integrity for your perimeter walls. The utility branch adds things like resource generation and cooldown reduction. If you ignore defense, you will find yourself respawning your base structures repeatedly around wave twelve, which eats into your point economy faster than you would think. I learned that the hard way during my first serious attempt.

The Offense Tiers

There are four main weapon categories. Lasers, ballistic, explosive, and area denial. Lasers are single-target and scale well into late game but require you to manage targeting manually. Ballistic is your auto-aim workhorse. Explosives hit groups but can damage your own structures if you are sloppy. Area denial is turrets and traps that fire on proximity. The counter-intuitive thing most people miss is that area denial actually outperforms explosives past wave twenty. The reason is spawn rate. Later waves introduce enemies that move faster and appear in clusters. Turrets do not care about accuracy, and they do not overpenetrate into your own lines. Ballistic is fine for clearing the early waves but starts falling off around wave fifteen unless you have invested heavily in fire rate upgrades.

Common Pitfalls

The biggest issue I see new players make is building one primary line of defense and ignoring flanking routes. The game has hidden spawn points that only reveal themselves once enemies come through them. If you build your walls in a straight line, you will get overwhelmed from the sides by wave eight or nine. Leave gaps on the perimeter and place turret stations there instead of full walls. It costs slightly more but saves you from a completely different problem. Another thing: the resource timer. Points accumulate passively between waves, but the passive rate is slow. Do not sit idle waiting for the timer. Use the manual click option to collect resources faster. It is right there in the corner and most people overlook it. Over one full run, that simple habit nets you roughly twenty percent more upgrade points. I measured it across five runs with and without it.

Edge Case: The Wave Sixteen Bug

There is a specific edge case in the current build where wave sixteen causes a pathfinding glitch on the desert map. Enemies spawn overlapping and some get stuck inside walls, which means they do not attack and your perimeter register zero damage from them even though they are alive. The game thinks your defenses are working when they are not. I hit this on my third run and had no idea why my health was dropping to zero in seconds. The workaround is to rebuild the affected wall section. Click on the wall that is glitched, demolish it, and place a new one in the same spot. This forces the engine to recalculate paths. It costs resources but it is faster than losing the entire run. The developer has acknowledged it in their forum but has not patched it yet.

Advanced Strategy Notes

If you want to push past wave thirty, you need to optimize your utility branch. Cooldown reduction on turrets and structural repair speed are the two upgrades that matter most at that level. The raw damage numbers become secondary because the game starts spawning enemies faster than any single weapon can clear them. What matters is how quickly your defenses regenerate and how often your area denial recharges. Save your highest-tier upgrades for the utility branch. I know that feels wrong because it is boring compared to upgrading your laser damage. Boring wins late game. The utility upgrades compound over time and their value scales exponentially. Damage upgrades scale linearly. By wave thirty, a maxed repair cooldown will save you more structure health than an extra tier of laser damage ever will. The game does not tell you any of this. It does not have a tutorial that covers it. You figure it out through repeated failure or by reading the detailed patch notes the developer posts on the forum, which are actually useful and full of mechanical insight. Read those if you want to understand the math behind the upgrades.

What Still Does Not Work Well

The matchmaking for co-op is broken. The lobby system connects you to players, but desyncs happen frequently, usually around wave twenty. I tried co-op twice and abandoned it. Single-player is stable. If you want to play with others, stick to the local hotspot mode, which runs everything on one machine and avoids the network issue entirely. It is limited to two players but it is functional. There is also no save system. You commit to a full run or you do not start. This is by design, I assume, but it means a single bad wave can waste forty minutes of progress. Make sure you are in a headspace where you can finish a run before you launch it. I have started several games and quit halfway through because something came up. That is just how it works. If you are looking for something similar but more forgiving, there are a few alternatives in the same space. Tower defense hybrid games tend to have better pacing and more generous mid-run options. But if you want the raw difficulty and the roguelike structure, this is the closest thing available right now. It is not polished, but the core loop holds up once you stop trying to min-max everything into one branch.