WW1 PC Games Spotlight: Verdun

WW1 Video games are few and far between, and there's nothing at all coming from major game developers. Most WW1 games are grand strategy games, but for those of us who don't enjoy these sorts of games there are very few games out there. But there are a few indie games and a few excellent mods out there that cover the genre, and this spotlight series will cover some of the best of these that I have played.

Verdun

Usually I don't buy early access games on Steam, but when I saw what was promised from the game Verdun I had to break my rule and make a purchase. Verdun is a multiplayer only first person shooter set on the battlefields around Verdun between French and German troops. The game is still in development and is rough around the edges, but it's well worth a look at here.

The game follows a defense and attack gameplay style based around trench lines. One side starts off assaulting the others trench, and then if they capture it have to repel a counter attack before pushing forward again. This combined with very open levels allows for both long range combat across no-mans land and close combat fighting in the trenches. The game has a one hit, one kill style combat, the only real exception being pistols and shots to the arm, leading to massive casualties during assaults and brutal close range fighting, whilst still being a little more arcade-y and not having such a steep learning curve as games like Red Orchestra. Currently games have 16v16 players, organised into 4 squads per side, each squad with four distinct player roles. This amount of players seems to be just right for most of the maps, although sometimes areas can get very crowded, and become mortar or machine gun bait for the enemy team. Currently both France and Germany have a sniper team and a light machine gun team, teams are supposed to have a mix of these squads in them, as they don't balance that well at the moment, with the machine gun team being much more useful and powerful than the sniper team in the games current state, to the point that sniper teams are very rare on servers at the moment. Squad leaders have special abilities, either to call in mortar fire or to request aerial recon, revealing the enemy on the mini map. They also possess a "command aura" than increases the effectiveness of the squad as well as giving them extra experience points and so encourages squad based cooperative gameplay, although without voice coms between players it is very easy for squads to get separated and turn into individualistic play. Squads level as members in them gain experience and over time uniforms and squad abilities are unlocked. You might be able to see the mix of early and mid war French uniforms in the picture above, and while this doesn't bother me much in game it does take the authenticity out of it a bit, as well as putting early war French troops in their scarlet trousers at a bit of a disadvantage when coming up against late war troops. Other than this though (and the current bugs) I have no problems at all with the game as the developers have created a very well executed and implemented game with interesting combat and back and forth gameplay, with the same areas of land being fought over time and time again during a single game, making for frustrating, but exciting gameplay.

As the game is currently in development there's still a lot more to come from this game. Currently the developers have said to be adding two extra squad types to the game, Canadians and German Stormtroopers as well as gas and gasmasks to make the hellish combat even more like a nightmare. Between the machine guns, mortar fire and bayonets you already die a lot during a game and hopefully this will make the game even more deadly. Updates and fixes come regularly to the game and the dev team seem to be dedicated to produce the best game that they possibly can, which is great news for players, even if you are wary of early access games. WW1 FPS games must be hard to pull off and still make them both authentic and interesting to play at the same time, and Verdun ticks all of the boxes here. The game looks fantastic even on low end machines like mine and runs very smoothly, the pictures given here are screenshots from my laptop with the settings on minimal, and so really don't do the game justice.

Verdun is currently available on steam, it is not yet finished but content and fixes come regularly. The online community is decently sized, so finding a game is not an issue, although there are some team balancing issues at the moment on smaller populated games. Well worth a look at if you want a game to fill the WW1 FPS hole.