House of Wolves

Own your own domain and command a band of men that are merry to fight to the death in the goal of expanding to the west

Time to Get Real

Real-time strategy? That's like real-life timescales applied to an oft-fantastical virtual world involving construction, management, and battling or something isn't it? "It most certainly is" replies your inner monologue-turned borderline-schizophrenic dialogue. "But House of Wolves" is of an altogether different breed" continues the voice of crazy in your head. This conversation is certainly representative of the general idea of House of Wolves, a real-time strategy game that  takes place on a two-dimensional, side-scrolling terrain. Building, repairing, and battling are what to expect from this RTS adventure, as well as a shed-load of style on account of the fact it's been developed by Louissi.

Upon shirking Survival mode in order to get accustomed to the main mode of gameplay first, you are tasked with the massive responsibility of saving not only yourself and a few others but your entire bloodline. The way you must go about doing this is to use your mouse to issue commands to troops along a two-dimensional plane. Use your mouse to make the screen scroll left and right on a piece of land that is initially quite limited in size but will soon become large as you manage to expand.

Clicking For Victory

You'll spend most of your time either clicking dutifully on individual troops and asking them to attack, build, or gather resources, or wrangling groups of men by left-clicking and dragging a green outline box over your desired selection. As is the nature of the genre in which this game comfortably holds residence, events take place in real time so you'll spend a lot of time ordering and waiting, ordering and waiting, and repeating this cycle forevermore. This may sound unappealing to fans of instant-action games like Warfare 1917 but it's rare that real-time actually means real time in flash-based RTS games, so one could take the approach that House of Wolves is positively refreshing.

There's plenty of figurative upwards progression to accompany the literal sideways advancement of your troops here. You may begin with humble huts that can recruit settlers and help you gather resources but expansion allows you to do a few more things like unlock buildings such as chicken or pig farms that add to your food supplies, and build barracks and archeries to train troops and archers respectively. You can even invoke the power of the supernatural by building wizard towers that can recruit, well, wizards of course. By this time you'll also be close to accessing the full-on fortress building-category to recruit catapults and knights.

As one would expect, upgrades are also a staple mechanism in House of Wolves as well as many other games, with additions like sharp spears to increase damage of spearmen, siegecraft to increase catapult range, and spell mastery to bump up mana, the ever-draining resource that powers the magical wizards of pretty much every wizard-containing game from abandonware Blood and Magic to modern-day games like Pokemon Tower Defense: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/566150.

Time Hurries for No Man

There's a lot to be said about House of Wolves' capacity to entertain. On the one hand you've got a wonderful 2D-plane concept, a well-designed interface, wonderful artwork, and a whole host of buildings, troops, and upgrades. On the other hand - and this is the hand that's attached to the wrist that wears the watch - there's no fast-forward option to speed up the events that are unfolding in real time. Because of this you will be doing a fair bit of waiting around while things happen, and then you'll order your troops to do more things, and then wait while they get these things done, and so on. So House of Wolves is more suited to those that have a fair bit of time to sink into it; a casual RTS game it is not, but a great one it most definitely is by armorgames.com.

A sequel - House of Wolves 2 has not yet been developed but we will be keeping you up to date if a second game in the series is announced.