Neighbors: Suburban Warfare Is a Sinister Multiplayer Game With a Friendly Face

I’m confident that even the most locked in gamer hasn’t played something quite like Neighbors: Suburban Warfare. You can see some influences and similarities to other games – it has the arcadey shooter feel of Team Fortress, the light tactical base building of a survival game, the slapstick physical humor of a Goat Simulator or Just Die Already – all in one anarchic post-WW2 package. I had a couple of hands-on sessions with it, navigating its team-based homewrecking action, and though its untraditional format will make for some rough first minutes, it was hard not to walk away from the over the top bedlam with a smile.

There’s maybe no more antithetical setting for Neighbors: Suburban Warfare’s team-versus-team base-building combat romp than the idyllic, prosperity-pilled 1950’s American suburbs. But developer Invisible Walls wanted to make a game that was bright and colorful and would be striking at first glance and approachable to a broad audience. “We also had this idea of the neighborhood feud element from day one,” art director Andreas Bech explained. “And for most of the team, the post-war optimism of the ‘50s and ‘60s resonates with that.”

The irony of the collective drive towards the presentation of perfectionism leading to individual households going so mad with power that they would sabotage their peers because they look like they might be doing too well was the bedrock for every iteration of Suburban Warfare. What started off as a game where players would decorate their houses and vandalize their opponents to win top prize at a sort of house pageant turned into a more raucous skirmisher “after it became apparent that [that version of the PvP and PvE] didn’t mix,” Invisible Walls CEO David Heldager revealed. “Everyone just wanted to destroy the other’s house.”

And so their game morphed into the squad-based hybrid shooter and base-builder that I got my hands on for around an hour with the dev team. Our goal was pretty clear: we must infiltrate the enemy abode and destroy its “essential items” like the stove, toilet, and master bed. This is much easier said than done, of course, as there are so many layers of variables and tactics that come into play during each match that chaos is unavoidable.

It all starts with character selection. Each of the eight available neighbors has their own signature starting items and special abilities, like the Rosie the Riveter-inspired Kim and her throwable pipe wrench that can build a special autonomous oil-spitting turret to defend her home when she’s out pillaging. There were two available neighborhoods (maps) to choose from, each dictating where neutral objectives will be, and each team can choose a specific house layout to use, each floorplan having its own different entrances and essential item locations. This felt like a lot to try to understand up front, but even though there is a county fair’s worth of variability in each match, the pursuit of “the perfect competitive combination” is a bit of a fool’s errand.

“We wanted to be different in that this is the game you play when you’re not playing [something more competitive like] Marvel Rivals,” David said when I asked the team if and how Suburban Warfare could appeal to the types of gamers that prefer a more sweaty PvP experience. “The tone is lighthearted and we designed it for lightheartedness, but we do find people start getting very competitive after like three or four games,” Andreas added. The design consensus among them was to focus on making cool things first, and balancing them second. “We were not experts on PvP and balancing when we started this game,” game director Sebastian Bevensee said, explaining that unfamiliar traps and weapons that will inevitably knock new players out will feel overpowered until they realize that just about everything is that strong on purpose. The goal is to make everything feel impactful so long as you hit with them, and encourage everyone to be a consequential playmaker when the opportunity presents itself.

After choosing your avatar to commit minor crimes with and agreeing to what kind of house you’re going to defend with your teammates (and where you’ll be defending it from your opponents), it’s time to get to the dirty business of targeted vandalization. Your team of up to four must build all manner of tools, traps, and defenses in order to turn away your annoying nosey neighbors while also empowering your team to be even more annoying and nosier. Buying tools or basic fortifications costs money that you earn slowly over time but in lump sums by knocking out enemies. More valuable options become available when you upgrade your workbench with spare resources found at the construction site, located in a neutral point on every map. After buying starter tools – usually the crowbar since it helps destroy objects faster – every round of Suburban Warfare I played started with a full team sprint towards these wayward crates.

My team was pretty good at making it out of the ensuing brawls with a couple of resources without taking too many casualties, but the early moments where no one has special gear is where I felt the character selection and team compositions the most. Big bruisers like Chad can hold the front line and distract the enemy long enough for someone else to snatch resources right out from under you. Or sneaky little bastards like this Dennis the Menace x Kevin McCallister hybrid who can avoid the melee completely and instead start attempting to break into your home while you’re gone. Neighbor’s individual special abilities remain impactful throughout the match, but ones with definite strengths above and beyond those never feel stronger than those first few minutes.

After taking the resources back we focused on locking down our house, lining the vulnerable parts of our fence with bear traps, repairing damaged doors and windows, and even setting up a small oil rig to turn our passive trickle of money into more of a sprinkler. All the while, both sides were taking turns poking at one another, sneaking to back doors and windows while causing a ruckus on the front lawns by either running up personally and trying to catch a poor homemaker slipping, or ordering more bombastic offensives on the enemy in the form of delivery trucks that speed through the cul de sac and lob boxes full of fireworks at your foes. And then, after around four minutes of game time, night fell on our pitched battle. Besides making the battlefield darker, it also signals that the nocturnal guard dog of each house is up and prowling, and it is devastatingly good at hunting down any enemy that steps onto your property and eliminating them with extreme prejudice, until the sun rises and the chaos ensues again.

Exchanges between squads, be they in the streets or each other’s living rooms, were always tense because the more dangerous weaponry, like a sledgehammer or a pressurized cannon that shoots oranges, can do players in quickly. And yet the hammer is slow and the cannon, one of the few ranged options in the game, is hard to aim and slow to fire and reload. This was all by design. “We are always encouraging people to be more up front and close,” Sebastian explained, pointing out that their focus on keeping the most effective and easy to use offense as close-ranged options forces players to engage with one another instead of trying to take sniper positions or control the field from afar.

That doesn’t constrain their weapon options from walking more on the wild side, though. Many of the options operate as you assume they would, but then there are some tricky takes on household items, like the aforementioned vacuum that can suck enemies into bashing range. You can build a chicken coup and toss their eggs at foes to blind them. With enough investment into your workbench you can get access to my favorite option so far: a seagull that you can fly to bomb enemies like a Call of Duty kill streak reward. The cartoony madness is lots of fun, moment to moment.

During the course of these cycles across the rounds I played, the biggest issue I found was feeling like I wasn’t doing the right thing at the right time. I wasn’t searching for the most efficient ways to spend money and resources so much as feeling like I was actively contributing to the overall goal of compromising the enemy’s home to a permanent end. Picking up the basics is easy, but learning how to know when to go all out on the enemy or when to pull back to defend was something that I couldn’t intuit in my brief time with Neighbors. David agreed. “Our main struggle is, ‘How do you explain the meta in a game like this?’” They’ve seen playtesters grow into sharp and knowledgeable players over half a dozen games or so, so it’s not impossible to let go of worry and embrace the madness.

So is Neighbors: Suburban Warfare the next big party shooter? I’m not sure how it will stand up against genre juggernauts, but it will certainly stand out. Two geezers shaped like Mr Magoo and Evel Knievel exchanging plunger crossbow fire in the street only to get hit by a delivery truck tossing bombs into the front yard is a scenario you aren’t going to find in your current favorite team shooter. And Invisible Walls likes it that way. They don’t want to replace your favorite game, they just want to be the Mad Men-coded funhouse you spend your off time in.

I’m confident that even the most locked in gamer hasn’t played something quite like Neighbors: Suburban Warfare. You can see some influences and similarities to other games – it has the arcadey shooter feel of Team Fortress, the light tactical base building of a survival game, the slapstick physical humor of a Goat Simulator or Just Die Already – all in one anarchic post-WW2 package. I had a couple of hands-on sessions with it, navigating its team-based homewrecking action, and though its untraditional format will make for some rough first minutes, it was hard not to walk away from the over the top bedlam with a smile.