One Military Camp Switch 2 Review

One Military Camp Switch 2 Review
Version Reviewed: Nintendo Switch 2

As Moonlight Peaks has officially been confiscated by our daughter, I found myself drafted into a very different assignment, taking charge of an army in One Military Camp. This military base management strategy game has you rebuilding a rundown camp, training recruits, and reclaiming territories across a board game-style world map, all while juggling the day-to-day demands of running a functioning military base. What’s It Like? Tighten up those bootstraps, stand at attention, and listen up, soldiers, as we review One Military Camp for Nintendo Switch 2.

One Military Camp opens with a wordless introduction that uses some fairly rough-looking animated cutscenes to establish the world. Dragan has seized control of the surrounding territories, cutting off water supplies, destroying the environment, and ruling with an iron fist for the past year. While the timeframe didn’t feel especially dramatic, I did like the setup. You have been pushed all the way back to a camp you abandoned long ago after Dragan seized all the other positions, which I thought was a clever concept for why you are starting all over again. When you arrive, the camp is in complete disrepair. Buildings are broken, infrastructure has fallen apart, and there isn’t anyone around to keep things running. From there, your job becomes rebuilding the base, training recruits, and gradually reclaiming territory across the world map, one region at a time.

The first thing that struck me was just how overwhelming One Military Camp can feel. The user interface is packed with information, the text is incredibly small, and some colour choices, particularly white text against yellow backgrounds, make certain menus difficult to read. Combined with the chunky character models and occasionally glitchy animations, it doesn’t make the strongest first impression. Thankfully, the tutorial does an excellent job of easing you into the game’s systems. Rather than throwing walls of text at you, it presents short in-game video explanations that can be replayed whenever needed. It also saves your progression of the game, which I didn’t fully appreciate until several hours later, when I was managing additional camps and the enemy kept reclaiming territories because of my “slow” progression. Along with this, I appreciated the way the tutorials simply stopped appearing, and only an hour later did I realise I had been managing the camp on my own for quite some time.

Once I started getting used to One Military camp, I found myself quite enjoying the management side of the game. Your early priorities are simple enough. Restore roads, reconnect power, provide food, and build accommodation before expanding into more specialised facilities. Every new recruit enters through the recruitment office, where you decide whether they’ll become maintenance staff, cooks, medics, researchers, defence personnel, or privates. Each private can also be assigned a training goal before eventually specialising into higher-tier roles, a system that seems fairly straightforward early on but becomes increasingly important as the campaign grows. The game encourages you to be selective when recruiting, warning you about undesirable traits and poor skill matches. Ironically, when I tried rejecting my first unsuitable applicant, the game immediately reprimanded me and insisted I hire them anyway, which gave me a laugh. Later in the campaign, though, I found myself doing exactly what the game warned against. Meeting expansion deadlines became far more important than finding perfect candidates, so I was often hiring whoever could fill the role. The only exception was anyone labelled a “Jinx.” That felt like a risk I wasn’t interested in taking.

There are also a few mechanics that the game never fully explains. One example is the coloured dots shown below each role. It took me quite some time to realise these represented the different training disciplines needed for each specialisation, with yellow for intelligence, blue for speed, red for strength, and purple for accuracy. Once I understood the system, it made perfect sense, but a little more explanation would have gone a long way. Progression feels rewarding, with recruits being able to choose jobs from four different tiers, with final specialised classes being needed later in the game.  Lower-tier roles quickly become less valuable as your army grows, only being needed occasionally, and with a maximum of 100 soldiers per base, choosing which specialisations to prioritise becomes an important strategic decision. As you progress further, you also start unlocking heroes, and the story develops around rescuing these heroes and celebrating the risky maneuvers they took to undermine their captors. There is also an option to customise soldiers with different names, faces, and skin colours, although I found very little reason to use it since everyone eventually wears the same class uniform.

Managing daily life inside the camp adds another layer of strategy. Soldiers need suitable accommodation, balanced work rosters, food, entertainment, and enough downtime to stay productive. This is where some of the game’s rough edges begin to show. Assigning upgraded housing becomes increasingly tedious because you have to scroll through long lists of buildings to locate available spaces for individual soldiers. Likewise, entertainment sometimes requires manually sending troops on breaks so they don’t go AWOL, then remembering to call them back to work afterwards. Forgetting leaves key facilities understaffed, and morale begins to suffer. A temporary break command or automatic return-to-work option would have made this system feel much less cumbersome. Despite these frustrations, there is something satisfying about watching a neglected military base slowly transform into a thriving operation. Once I understood the game’s many systems, I found myself wanting to optimise layouts, improve efficiency, and continue pushing further across the map. The moment you start getting comfortable with the core gameplay loop, the game then tasks you with defending your base from attacks, which get harder and harder to defend, adding another level of strategy. It asks for a fair amount of patience early on, but it does reward players who stick with it.

One Military Camp has a charming art style. The colourful buildings and chunky character designs give it a light-hearted look that suits its management focus, even if you’re rebuilding an army. Much like in Laysara, I found myself pausing every now and then just to watch what my little soldiers were getting up to. Whether they were bowling during their downtime, racing quad bikes around a dirt track, or trying out their ghillie suits, there are plenty of little animations that make the camp feel alive and reward you for taking a moment to look around. Unfortunately, the story cutscenes don’t reach the same standard. The animations are rough, with Sergeant Hawkins’ eyes and eyebrows moving in some very strange ways, while many of his movements look stiff or repetitive. Most scenes are conversations between Hawkins and whichever villain happens to be on screen, occasionally interrupted by allies or civilians caught behind enemy lines. By around the five-hour mark, I found myself skipping through many of them because they rarely changed what I needed to do next or gave me much reason to stay invested until a bit later when the Hero storylines started to emerge. The camera also sits in an awkward middle ground. There were plenty of times I wanted to zoom in closer to appreciate the details around my base, while other times I wanted to zoom out a little further to better manage everything that was happening. Instead, I’d often find myself opening the world map sooner than I intended. Combined with the tiny user interface, it can make managing a busy base more difficult than it needs to be.

From a technical perspective, One Military Camp performs well on Nintendo Switch 2. The framerate remains relatively smooth throughout most of the experience, even once your base becomes much busier later in the game. There is the occasional bit of jank while scrolling around the camp, but it was never enough to get in the way. The bigger issue is consistency. Character animations often appear to run at a lower framerate than the gameplay itself, making movement look noticeably choppier than the rest of the game. Sometimes, there were cutscenes I would want to watch for learning purposes that would skip without my prompt. Thankfully, I didn’t encounter any crashes or major bugs during my time with it. While the presentation could certainly use another layer of polish, particularly around the cutscenes, animations and user interface, the underlying management experience remains solid.

For my soldiers looking into accessibility, One Military Camp includes a colour blind filter along with the ability to disable misophonia-related sounds. Mouse controls are also supported, although as always, I’d recommend doing a little more research to make sure the game suits your individual accessibility needs.

At just under $37.50 AUD, I wasn’t expecting a huge amount from One Military Camp. While it certainly has its fair share of rough edges, particularly with its user interface, cutscene animations and quality of life features, I still found myself becoming invested in the management systems. There was a genuine sense of satisfaction every time another piece of the puzzle fell into place, whether that was streamlining my base, training the right recruits, or successfully reclaiming another territory. One Military Camp knows exactly what it wants to be. It doesn’t try to reinvent the management genre. Instead, it focuses on building, training and expanding your military base, and for the most part, it succeeds. It won’t be for everyone, but if you like taking a struggling base and slowly growing into a well-oiled operation, One Military Camp is one mission that might be worth taking.

So, What’s it Like? One Military Camp is like Laysara, crossed with a simplified version of Civilization.

In the Interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this doesn’t influence my score.

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