LemWar / Lemmings at War

Armed and disgruntled Lemmings — that's LemWar. While the classic Lemmings from the mid-nineties were about getting those dim-witted creatures to the goal, here it's about having a few groups slaughter each other. It's not an upgrade in the good sense of the word, more like a mutation that was supposed to be funny and comes across as stale.

On DOS you're dealing with one thing: divide your Lemmings into groups, assign them traits (faster, stronger, armored), and send them at each other. You barely control anything yourself. The handful of commands you have mainly serve to cheat the physics or dig trenches. Compared to the pleasant logic of classic Lemmings, where you're both architect and rescuer, here you sit and watch ants from one side crawl at ants from the other. There's not enough control for it to be strategic, but too much randomness for it to be tactical.

The graphics stick to the original series' style — pixelated, colorful, with that typical nineties sheen. Sound is the weak point though, as is the battle animation, which feels more like toy soldiers clashing in a sandbox than any real combat. The levels are mechanically simple, whether against a live player or the AI. When the AI plays itself, it does just about anything to avoid losing, which is neither stupid nor clever.

The reason LemWar exists is probably just one: the joke that Lemmings can fight. That's enough for a fanzine or a twist on the classic, but not for a game you want to play for more than ten minutes. A format bloated with elements that don't work — that's the story of this attempt at next-level gaming.

Treat it as a curiosity, not a proper game. If you're a Lemmings fan with a soft spot for experimentation, stick with it just long enough to figure out where it fell apart. It's an artifact that says more about the ambitions of the nineties than the quality of game design.