The year is 1918 and the Great War is coming to an end. The Germans have dug in and American troops have begun supporting the Allies on the western front. From that moment, training mode begins and I find myself thrown into a burning and war-weary Europe. Starting backwards is an exciting storytelling technique. You’ll quickly become familiar with the full range of vehicles, technology, etc., because when you start a new campaign you can of course choose to start with 1914 or 1916, but there’s still a lot locked. The practice mode allowed me to quickly grasp all the elements of this medium difficulty strategy game.
You have a campaign mode with text-based events, town improvements, buying materials and cannons. In this mode, which is reminiscent of Total War, you make big decisions that have consequences in battles; which trenches on the western front need to be reinforced; which ones need improvement; what technology needs to be unlocked and where your resources need to be transported. With the campaign, you are basically balancing the spending of money and the availability of resources. The rules of the game are also explained here. Your goal is to reduce your enemy’s will to fight to zero through direct combat, smart decisions, and inflicting casualties on the enemy using your resources and strategic cunning.
As soon as you personally come to a battle, all types of troops, vehicles and everything else you sent will be brought into this sandbox. You can then use your resources to build and upgrade trenches, deploy soldiers and artillery, and more. Using your limited resources will force you to play the role of attacker or defender. Both sides can change strategy at any time, and the real star of this strategy game isn’t the somewhat outdated graphics or nondescript cutscenes, but the planning phase, where you can lay out your trenches, lay out barbed wire, hawthorn, machine gun nests and build a line of defense.
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You can also use Pioneers to blast the enemy’s defenses during battle. With the help of new technologies such as machine guns, gas, airplanes, hot air balloons and other things, the soldiers fall like flies. The game even saves the damage you deal to the environment, the layout of the trenches in that particular hex, etc. for the next fight. This means that maps with vegetation, houses and life dynamically become no man’s land throughout the campaign. I love this particular mechanism and hope more developers make use of it as in this particular case it is also an ugly reminder of the terrible tragedy of the Great War.
From time to time thousands of soldiers may die during the fighting and that is because they are dying. The Great War: Western Front puts this sort of meat grinder conflict into perspective, and while the focus is only on a small portion of the Western Front rather than the entire war, it’s a grueling pastime for better or worse. Battles come and go, testing your will to keep sending soldiers to their deaths. It’s easy to hit the rolling artillery that sends waves of men through no man’s land to whistles before silence falls after enemy machine gun fire mows them down. Like you, the enemy will try to reinforce their positions and attack you. This is a war of meters, not kilometers. Each square you take often means the enemy will take another, and if you regain lost terrain, chances are the enemy will too.
In the early hours of the campaign, battles often consist of standoffs, small victories, and the occasional big victories. Even if you capture one or both control points from the enemy side, it doesn’t mean you win the whole war. During battles, the only diplomacy in the game comes into play. If you see that you have slowed down the enemy or inflicted a small loss, you can call for a truce. You can also withdraw your forces and admit defeat. It may cost you in the short term, but you can save thousands of men to fight another day.
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Knowing when to call a truce and when to throw away everything you have, including valuable resources that can be used in another conflict, is the key to success. If you spend all your materials during battles and don’t have money to buy more on the campaign map, you won’t be able to attack the opponent on another part of the front. I think the computer slows down the player appropriately because while it cheats, it worked fine during the time I spent on the campaign. It’s not exactly praise, because I want to believe that AI opponents can get smarter if the will is there in the industry.
As far as sound goes, the game is more than okay. Instead, the graphics look a bit dated. I suspect scaling of all effects and such is a factor, but the graphics could have benefited from a little more detail and care to meet today’s strategy game standards. The 2D animations don’t impress. I understand that 3D sequences don’t come cheap, but at the same time detailed sequences add to the overall atmosphere and experience.
Despite the graphics, it feels like a competent and well thought out game. We rarely get good WWI strategy titles from experienced developers, although there have been more WWI titles in other genres in recent years. Petroglyph Games don’t like game development and it shows clearly. I hope Petroglyph gets a chance to recreate the Eastern Front and possibly all of the war in the future, as the addition of new nations to the conflict over the years of the campaign would greatly benefit its diversity. It would also be interesting to be able to fight a two-front war as Germany and play as the shifting alliance of Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia, or the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
It’s a game that tries to make the western front interesting with new premises. I can see the passion that permeates the project despite some flaws, and it also shows that the game doesn’t really have the budget it needs. The multiplayer lacks a campaign mode and the battles alone probably won’t be entertaining forever. The anti-computer campaign and historical skirmishes that come with the pack are by far the highlight here.
At the moment there is nothing quite like The Great War: Western Front and it is probably the best modern take on trench warfare out there. I’ve had enough fun with the different systems in the game to say it’s a great experience; However, it has its flaws that prevent it from reaching perfection.