There are about a million games about World War II for every game about World War I, and The Great War: Western Front serves as a pretty good example of some of the reasons why. The brutal and bloody wars of attrition of 1914-1918 are interesting from a military history standpoint, but difficult to turn into a fun video game with any kind of credibility. This RTS adaptation tries to find a satisfying balance point between historical reality and fun gameplay. And while I think it worked out as well as anyone could have hoped for, the challenge of gamifying these shell-pocket battlefields just can’t be entirely smooth.
Densely entrenched and relentlessly bombarded, the Western Front was an intolerable stalemate that took years to resolve and was only settled much later with the advent of new technology and tactics. And The Great War: Western Front, for better or worse, doesn’t do much to sugarcoat it.
The first major adjustment I had to make was about the complete deadline of a modest defensive position. You can, and with the help of machine gun nests, you can double that number even more. Because much of the early war was spent in playfully discovering by commanders on both sides. bottom.
If you want to play a little more aggressive, use cannons to overwhelm enemy trenches, use rolling barrages to kick up smoke and dirt to hide advancing troops, and if you have enough supplies, stay alive. You can casually bombard the sunshine. Enemy position from completely safe until there are no defenders left. This latter strategy can feel a little cheap, as the AI keeps tipping in men to replace the ones that are blown sky-high. is not necessarily inaccurate.
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Taken together, this encouraged me to think of each battle as a highly precise concert, and I mostly came to enjoy it. It felt great when it worked. However, it can be very frustrating when it doesn’t. Even a small mistake in timing or routing can cause entire regiments to vaporize before your eyes. Especially when entering and exiting trenches, it was not uncommon for doomed soldiers to stall or limp before getting where they needed to go.
French green space
World War I certainly wasn’t a flashy affair, and the Western Front wasn’t always visually stunning either. It just can’t be expanded on enough to make sense of what they’re feeling. Sometimes it looks like you’re looking at a wild ant farm.
That’s not to say these battlefields aren’t eye-catching or otherwise effective, though. They’re very legible, which is a big plus during complex engagements.The bright colors and high contrast between units and terrain make it easy to track your troops’ movements. The sounds and visual effects of different types of shells are distinct and easy to spot. The devastation left on the battlefield, including smoldering craters and charred forests, effectively tell the story of the conflict that tore the world apart in many ways.
The interface works well in both battles and campaigns, showing you the information you really need without feeling too busy or cluttered. Even going through and rebinding all the keyboard shortcuts that turned out to be absolutely terrible was limited in what I could do. To give one prime example, you can’t bind Pause and Unpause to a single toggle key. I ended up having to assign each of them to one of the mouse thumb buttons.
war march
The Great War: Western Front features a detailed and dynamic campaign that begins in December 1914, revealing the realities of gamifying this particular part of the war like no other. The basic idea is that each space on the map has a number of stars that must be depleted to capture it, and only overwhelming tactical victories can remove stars. , which means that the front line does not move often. The purpose of many fights is just to make your opponent bleed more than they make you bleed. This is a clever and historically resonant setting. You can win without even getting close to the enemy capital simply by depleting the fighting spirit of the enemy camp. All the while having to manage cash reserves and supplies, making difficult and meaningful decisions about where to reinforce lines and how many shells are worth spending to break a dug-in position. must be lowered.
At least in theory. In fact, even modest victories can compensate for the will of the people on the other side, so gains in one area often feel spoiled by setbacks in another. It’s a pretty accurate depiction of what war was like on the Western Front, and I can give it a lot of respect. is not particularly challenging. It’s hard to feel a sense of accomplishment or victory when you’re fighting a war of inches.
There are mechanisms that come into play later to mitigate this. Such as gas attacks and air support. The latter, by the way, feels a little too effective with its ability to wipe out entire infantry regiments with strafing biplanes. And of course tanks change the situation dramatically later on as frontal attacks suddenly become more viable. Taking away their national will is a slow job, and I ended up fighting many similar or nearly identical battles to do so.
Any entrenchments you build or terrain you destroy between two hexes persist each time you fight there, so there are some neat dynamics. But his 10 defenses of Ypres can be exhausting. There’s an auto-solve option, but the range of random outcomes is pretty wide, so I was usually skeptical about using it unless the predictions showed an overwhelming advantage.
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The Allies faction is also easier to play than the Central Powers because you have to balance the morale drop caused by the language barrier with the wide variety of interesting perks that infantrymen of different nationalities can bring to the table. For example, the British are better at crack shots with rifles, while the Americans are better at advancing with armored support.
The Central Powers have two main advantages. The first is conscripts. Infantry is weak, has poor accuracy, and morale costs little. This allows for some very cost-effective strategies, but it’s not nearly as fun as the multinational zoo the other side gets. But these guys don’t really fight like modern infantry, and I don’t know if the combat engine is really set up for them. It lacks the ability to land quickly on the ground using cover and suppress fire to a historically game-changing extent.
