That poor old Ostrich, the fella never had a chance once Archie Duke got hungry, and thus the powder keg that was Europe erupted. Anyway, that’s enough about history, I’ll get onto Henry the 8th and his six knives if I keep going. The Great War: Western Front is the latest game from Petroglyph Games and Frontier Foundry, based around World Kerfuffle 1. You take point as commander of one of the great armies and try to gain ground in a game of inches across hundreds of miles. You may remember I recently wrote about the game’s demo.

I could have possibly gotten this review done sooner and closer to The Great War: Western Front‘s release, though delays happened. In short, we got the key to get a review done for the embargo, 24-ish hours later the key was revoked due to an issue with the review build. We were told that we’d get another key once it was resolved post-release. I don’t mind making sure reviewers have the best experience so they can convey that to possible players, but an email noting the known issue could have sufficed. A good game shines through its flaws no matter what.

It is difficult to say given the subject matter, but The Great War: Western Front is great once you get past that tutorial that I mentioned heavily from the demo. Like anyone who knows The Great War beyond the fact Germany is widely considered the bad guy (and as I mentioned before) this is the war that had nuance, changed history forever, and would sow the seeds for politics over the next 100 years. Saying that a game based on the war where soldiers would march through the mulch of their decomposed comrades is fun causes me to hesitate.

It is not the direct history lesson that Peter Jackson’s collaboration with the IWM was. The Great War: Western Front puts you in command as you play out the four years of Tug-of-war. On the command map, you strategically place your reserves from the allied powers through France to push back through the Ardennes, back through Luxembourg, and into the Rhineland. This is in the first of the two main campaigns. You’ll later move on to play as the Central Powers pushing against the Allied Forces.

A hexagonal board game of European regions, this is a typical game of push and pull with your forces represented by stacks of chips on each territory. Atop each stack is a painted toy soldier or a piece of battle machinery you’ll take into each fight across the line. Every turn is a month of planning, small victories, loss/gain of ground, or researching the next tide to change the grand stalemate in your favor. The win-state of this great game played with the lives of young men (the pawns of command) is decided by two things: National will and capture of command points.

This is the point that I find difficult to talk about too much. I found it much easier to break down the will of the opposing side, holding out slowly over time. A victory by pushing the line back takes more resources than is easily amassed in 48-ish turns, which is a true example of the limited aid that is available in wartime conflict. There are not enough gold reserves, rations, or men to stand in the trenches. There are also not enough tanks to outlast the bombs or keep up the constant bombardments and not enough planes to take out the observation balloons, machinegun nests, and mortar emplacements.

The real-time gameplay limits you in other ways. Before a battle, you’ll be given an overview of the battlefield in its current state with no prior battles you have to create trenches. Repeated battles with visible scars from encamped ordnance show the wounds of war on a once green rolling landscape turned into a grey block of Havarti. In that pre-battle map, you’ll place your infantry, choose where the guns go, decide where any new trenches will go or if others will be upgraded, and make other pre-battle decisions. This is limited by a set number of supplies you take into battle.

In the overview of the front you also have gold reserves with which you can buy more global supplies or select units, however, here you’re limited by a single currency. In the overview map’s tech tree, you will be able to spend research points to keep up with the technical advancements of war. Nothing creates progress more than humans wanting to kill each other for reasons best known only by those holding pens instead of weapons. This can add tanks, chemical warfare, planes, more long-game elements such as espionage, and more advanced trenches.

Where one half of gameplay is Civilization or any turn-based strategy as you move units into place for battles, the other is every real-time strategy with a ticking clock deciding if and when victory takes place. Victory and defeat are actually decided in an interesting way. Across the top of the screen, you’ll find some red, blue, and grey-scale checkered bars. The very top checkered one is a tilting scale that changes with every action or inaction you take. Depending on the whim of the gods or as I once thought the number of units you have, the scale will move closer or further away from your stalemate to “victory.”

On the one hand, you can hold position and take a 0-0 draw as a victory, but to get anywhere, you need to push. Unless you know that you are outnumbered, you should give bombardment and senseless murder a chance. One thing that is important to highlight since I know it can often be an off-putting part of real-time strategies, is that you can pause, slow, or speed up the action in battle. The pause and half-speed play are there to offer you time to think if need be, or be an adult. I’m still not over it Kingdom Come!

Each side has three or four capture points depending on the battlefield: A (X), B (Y), sometimes C (Z), and a command point. The strategy I’ve found easiest is to bombard on the initial run to enemy trenches then take the capture point as they try to overwhelm you and get slaughtered along the way. From there, circle around pushing out their depleted forces with shelling and gassing. It sounds psychotically simple, and that’s because it often is. After many hours of playing multiple variations in four differing 1914 and 1916 campaigns, AI often never pushed for points as I did.

9 times out of 10, when in a fight that is tilted towards your victory, the AI won’t push as hard into No Man’s Land. Once you know this, The Great War: Western Front becomes a lot easier to understand and subsequently triumph in a battle. Evidently, prevailing in said battle doesn’t mean you’ll win territory, in fact, often (correctly so) you’ll find it difficult to gain much territory at all on your first foray. The one element of this big game of fisty-cuffs that I cannot understand fully is what condition predicts or almost guarantees taking a star from a region.

Each tile of the overview map is a real region of France, Germany, Belgium, or Luxembourg, and each region has its own significance and stars assigned to it. One example is Verdun, which is significant to the French for reasons best known to the criminally insane among you. Verdun has a four-star rating/significance and a national will contribution of 20. Meanwhile, Lille contributes 6 points to the national will and is only two stars. To take over any region, you must take all the stars, which is easier said than done.

In the battles of Verdun on Longwy or otherwise, within the real-time element, you’ll find that the map on the top right has a number of stars that indicates whether or not your victory (or eventual ceasefire) is enough to take one. On the one hand, I think the 20-minute time limit per battle offers you enough time to get some damage in while also not taking too long. The other hand, which is talking to me thanks to shell shock, is saying that some variation on those time limits might have been more useful. Some deviations might offer a different challenge.

When holding off the lads that have gone over the top by gunning them down like wildebeest on the run, the 20-minute time limit is often a reprieve. Don’t get me wrong, when down on men and resources, the 20 minutes feel like I’ve got enough time and no more. Other times it can be too much to conceivably enjoy what you can in a pyrrhic victory once you’ve exhausted all of your resources. It is the war characterized by young men being sent to the front by those holding pens instead of bayonets after all, that long hold-out would seem right. 

You can call the cease-fire/surrender at any time, though once you’ve exhausted your supply of men, resources, and chances of holding the victory, you only have minutes left on the clock. It may also be worth noting that if the real-time element still feels complicated or you can’t be bothered with an attack on your regions, you can also auto-resolve a battle. In the battlefield deployment stage, you are given a checkered bar (similar to the in-battle one) with the auto-resolve outcome as a yellow highlight, which I took to assume was your chance of success. It is not, as I took a stalemate draw to a great victory with half the time left on the clock.

The AI can often be very stupid, such as occasionally climbing out of trenches that have tunnels connected. Multiple times I’ve sent some units to capture select points, and cut off the reinforcements coming down the line. That only works when you’re in the bloody trenches in the first place lads! In many of those cases, provided you haven’t already gassed the support, support trenches will mow you down like St Augustine under a riding lawn mower.

The timer “issue” I mentioned is of course fixable in skirmish mode. Skirmish mode is a malleable quick battle mode based on no historical fight, but created entirely by you using whatever parameters you desire. This includes late-war fights in the summer with a massive amount of troops and supplies, supported by whatever you like and on a time limit of your choosing. The time limit can go up to 30 minutes or under 20 minutes. It is possible to do this within one of the game’s modes, so I can’t comprehend why the campaigns of The Great War: Western Front don’t include it too.

The other main mode that is worth noting is the historical battles, another in-battle piece of gameplay but this time constrained by historical relevancy. This includes the battles of the Somme, Champagne, Cantigny, and more, scaled-down to be represented by only 30 units a side at a time or less. A historically accurate attempt to recreate what happened with very narrow but simple objectives, such as the one for Passchendaele in the Autumn of 1917 being to capture Z. This has the same gameplay as the main campaign and skirmishes just restricted excessively to make the battle more accurate.

In these historical battles, you’ll need to complete more objectives than that. For example, the first battle to use chlorine gas and create the “Zone Rouge”  is the second battle of Ypres, with your objective being to hold out until the Canadians reinforce the line. That’s what you’re told on the menu, but in reality, your goal is to capture the whole German front, forcing a retreat by the German forces before undoubtedly the Allies fell back 3-miles closer to Ypres. As a more concentrated experience, the historical battles are arguably better overall than the other modes for pure gameplay.

Balloons lowering automatically when you capture and install new machinery in historical battles do get on my nerves though. Similarly, when capturing command points, the timer for some objectives doesn’t pause as it does for ABC and XYZ. As such, it can get infuriating to be seconds away from completing the objective and historically you’ve been defeated. At which point would Asquith, Lloyd George, and Haig collectively tip the table? As the clock ticks down or when you’re told you’ve been defeated despite being on the offensive? They’d be scared of the moving pictures, probably.

It’s challenging to say the entirety of The Great War: Western Front is “fun,” especially when you do as I did (and should be done), reading All Quiet on the Western Front at the same time. This wasn’t the war that started “Oorah” or the beating of one’s chest over who technically won. The First World War is the last one (no question) we collectively give reverence to. It was the last point of “gentlemanly warfare” dying or more aptly choking. Though the historical accuracy is there and admiration is given, you as a player need to do extracurricular learning of the on-the-ground horror.

What cinema doesn’t fully convey is that there were 125 million tons of toxic chemicals used, or that today we still hear of farmers and beyond in the “récolte de fer” (iron harvest) finding unexploded bombs still intact. Though there are plenty of voice lines in French, English, German, Belgian, and Urdu (I think) of the young men in your command, there is no real connection to the hundreds of thousands or millions of lives you are taking. The Great War: Western Front simply can’t communicate the sheer scale of not only what you are doing but its results down the line.

It is not without trying, as the aforementioned scars of repeated battles highlight the impact you have. Yet it often feels superficial after a couple of different campaigns. That said, the surrounding art of the gameplay truly captures the era of culture we’re in. The postcards, posters, and images on loading screens, the music, and the overall tone are beautiful. The greens of the early war fights eventually turning to the muted din of browns and grey of later battle efforts in the war is exactly what The Great War: Western Front needed most in gameplay.

Overall, The Great War: Western Front does a lot to put you into the position of commander of either the Allied forces or the Central Powers, and does it well. Though where accuracy is observed in several segments to highlight historical relevance, the campaigns lack something to keep up with the historical elements fully. The game is hands-off enough to allow you to apply your desired strategies and with a number of difficulty options to be as accessible as possible, there could have been more direction in campaigns. A great turn-based and real-time strategy with some minor problems, The Great War: Western Front does what it needs to but never astonishes in the end.

A PC review copy of The Great War: Western Front was provided by Frontier Foundry for the purposes of this review.

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The Great War: Western Front

$35.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Easy to learn, hard to master gameplay.
• The entire tone is brilliant.
• An understanding that there isn't really a villain.

Cons

• The tutorial could be a touch better.
• The "campaign" lacks some needed direction.
• Campaign battles lacking a great variety in difficulty.