![]() ![]() As opposed to ordering individual soldiers around à la Command & Conquer, or overseeing the tactical moves of specialized squads in Company of Heroes, Western Front is about the high-level decisions made in combat. In gamifying the “war of inches,” Petroglyph is wise to avoid getting lost in the mechanical weeds. During the demo, with my hand on the mouse and my fingers on the keyboard, time melted away. Of course, I’m making these uneasy observations in retrospect. As field commanders, players can launch poisonous gas into enemy lines, forcing soldiers out of their trenches and into the spray of water-cooled machine guns. One of its historic missions zooms in on the river Somme, the banks of which became the site of a million casualties over the span of five months in 1916. In these respects, Petroglyph seems to understand the weight of the source material it’s working with here, and is taking steps to distance itself from the complications of “pure” non-fiction.Īnd yet, Western Front’s loading screens alternate between advertisements for war bonds and quotes about the cost of victory from military leaders. What’s more, battalions on the overworld map look more like wooden toys than detailed individuals. Like the historical titles in the Total War franchise, and the upcoming Company of Heroes 3, Western Front allows you to rewrite the broader details of a real conflict. To its credit, the latter allowed me to maneuver soldiers, tanks, and aircraft across France and Belgium as I saw fit - feinting an attack on this part of the front, only to launch a surprise assault far to the North. It’s slated for a March 30 release, but I spent several hours with the game this week, playing a scripted historical battle and the early turns of a long-form, open-ended campaign. In Red Alert, Hitler never rose to power, thus allowing Soviet Russia to expand across Europe and ignite an alternate version of World War II.Īll of which makes Western Front, a real-time strategy game about a very real and very bloody conflict, a bit of a deviation for Petroglyph. Even the studio’s most recent release, the excellent Command & Conquer Remastered Collection, centered on parallel universes. ![]() Petroglyph Games, a developer formed from the remnants of Westwood Studios in 2003, made its mark in the strategy space with Star Wars: Empire at War, 8-Bit Armies, and Conan: Unconquered - games that were either overtly fictitious, or stylized to the point of being cartoons. The vast majority, Sheftall said, “try to tell the story of an individual, when the real story of World War I is really about the mass.” If Battlefield 1, Verdun, and Valiant Hearts were stories about the individual, the upcoming The Great War: Western Front is the latter: a game about the determined yet deteriorating mass of the war to end all wars. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times in 2019, Mark Sheftall, a history professor at Bucknell University, highlighted a trend in stories about the Great War. ![]()
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