This military base-building sim has all of the soldiers and none of the violence

If you're a fan of building and management games like Two Point Hospital, maybe I can interest you in a sim featuring the types of characters who put people in the hospital.

I'm talking about soldiers. One Military Camp is a base-building and management game where you're in charge of a—well, you can probably guess from the name. Recruit new soldiers, train them into different specialties like comms operations, artillery, explosives, medics and infantry, and even upgrade them into elite operatives like spies, pilots, and tank drivers.

To do that you'll need to grow your run-down little military camp into a booming operation, filled with training buildings, obstacle courses, watch towers, warehouses, maintenance yards, and landing pads. To whip your soldiers into shape you'll need veterans to serve as instructors, and discipline is key so you can keep everyone on a strict schedule. You'll also need to manage resources like food, gear, and supplies while keeping your camp within its budget.

But along with all the weapons training and jogging in formation and loudspeakers blaring trumpeted anthems, you'll also need to keep morale up among your eager little soldiers by making the camp look nice with parks, plazas, and decorations. Provide leisure activities like ping-pong tables, pinball machines, and gaming tables—it's just not basic training unless your soldiers can play a little poker now and then. (I'm basing that not on personal military experience—I am a coward—but on every military movie I've ever seen.)

The details and animations in One Military Camp's trailers look great, with soldiers running through those obstacle courses filled with tires, training at the firing range, lifting weights and boxing, driving minitanks around sandpits, and even carefully stepping through laserbeams in an espionage practice course. In the trailer you can catch a glimpse of a diver being pursued by a shark in a small pool, presumably to level up their swimming skills for aquatic missions.

Interestingly, there's no real violence in One Military Camp which must be a first for a game about training soldiers into elite killing machines. There are missions and quests, and you send squads of your soldiers and specialists to locations on the world map via chopper, but the carnage takes place offscreen. The only real combat you'll see appears to be if an enemy drone invades and starts dropping bombs on your buildings, which can be countered by setting up defensive measures like turrets and missile launchers.

One Military Camp has just announced an early access release date of March 2, and publisher Abylight Studios has also revealed a roadmap which includes a sandbox mode coming in April, pets added in May, soldier customization options in June, and a full release aiming for September. 

Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.