Have You Played… Hogs of War?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

A long time ago, deep in the cyberyear 2000, came a turn-based multiplayer war game called Hogs of War [Steam page]. It was essentially Worms in 3D, with pigs. But whereas Worms spawned an undying horde of sequels, to the extent that the franchise is now a bonafide industry joke that nobody knows how to address, Hogs of War never saw a sequel. Perhaps it's just as well, fond as it was of puerile humour and cheap national stereotypes.

That didn’t bother me at the time, of course. I just liked bayoneting British pigs into nearby lakes and watching them drown until they exploded, for that is the kind of youth I was, and this was the kind of bacon logic it offered. I also enjoyed sniping hogs from long distance, and getting the high ground from where you could launch cluster bombs on groups of cowering enemies.

It didn’t catch on, which feels odd to me now, looking at Team 17’s dominance of the turn-based artillery genre for two full decades. But I like to think, in some parallel world, there are 26 identical Hogs of War games and only a single long-forgotten Worms.