Verdun is a very beautiful, first-person shooter from the developers at Blackmill Games and M2H Game Studio, this involvement has made for a shooter that’s not only perfect for clans and groups of friends, but for solo players. The game’s very well made, with a love and passion for realism and authenticity, modeling tens of World War 1 weapons, also using a few historical battles as inspiration for the maps in the game, which are well planned out and lots of fun to play.
Gameplay runs about the same as Battlefield 3’s Conquest mode, with a few additions. You push and pull in a tug of war for territory over the enemy team’s trenches. Once all of them are taken or the time runs out, who ever has the most wins. There’s also a free for all deathmatch in which you can only use rifles, but that’s pretty self explanatory, and I didn’t check it out much.
The real meat of the gameplay is in the squad mode. Which is very well balanced and fun. The squads in the game, (around 8 or 9 I think) all come from different areas, France, Britain, Canada, Germany and such. But they all have the same roles: Corporal; Tells squadmates to attack, defend and can call in mortar strikes and various gasses, forcing people to put their gas masks on. Rifleman; Uses bolt action rifles to strike enemies from a distance or up close in a trench. Gunner; A defence class with an automatic machine gun. Bomber; A supportive rifleman.. with grenades.
These 4 classes make up all of the squads in the game, the only difference being different attires, voices and names for the roles. But because of this, the game is very well done, there’s only four people in a squad which means that there’s always one of each role. (two people can’t both be rifleman, etc) It means that you have to specialise in all four in case you don’t get the class you want. But they’re still pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it, and it will take time. For the first hour of gameplay I didn’t even get a single kill, and you die with pretty much one shot if it hits you anywhere but your legs. (Remember, they didn’t have antibiotics in WW1) But as I was chatting away to the people in the server, not a single person said the game was bad, and I agree with them. It’s a wonderful game. There’s no interactive in game tutorial, which was a big loss for me. But I still managed to find my way slowly.
There’s also a good leveling system when you start getting into the game, whenever you level up there’s a certain amount of “Career Points” you will earn that you can then spend on different attachments and extra weapons for your roles, it brings in some extra gameplay. (I’m loving that sniper scope.)
Now, for the audio and visual side of things, I’m not a very good judge. My computer barely passed 20 FPS whilst playing this. (Integrated Intel cards are the bane of my life.) But even on the lowest graphics, this game looks great. If you really want to see how good it looks, just check out the trailer. (There will be a video below) The maps, weapons and characters are all beautifully modelled, sticking to the world war 1 look from the skybox and trenches all the way to the gasmasks. It even has classic music playing in the main menu whilst you wait for a game, It’s very nostalgic and beautiful.Talk about the audio (oh my god the audio) Whilst I played this I had my headset on, and all I could hear were shots whizzing past my head as soon as they were fired, the corporal’s whistle screaming as everyone charged into no-man’s-land, mortar shells firing on us as we ran into their trench. It was very immersive and stunning, but also spine-chilling. Every time a shot flew past my head I had to duck behind the nearest rock to make sure I didn’t drop dead.
This game is beautiful, in both audio and video, but obviously, I can’t be the judge too much.. Verdun is a beautiful World War 1 multiplayer FPS, It’s focus on competitive teamwork and co-operation makes for fun games. It’s squad based leveling system and leadership works well to keep everyone in check during the constant tug of war between the allies of the French and the Germans. I would have liked a bit more low-end PC compatibility, just to give yourself a wider audience and me a chance of running at 30 FPS.
Regadless, I love this game and I think you should pick it up if you’re a history nut or if you like First Person Shooters like Battlefield or Call of Duty, though it’ll be a little more on the hardcore scale than you expect. If you do want to pick this game up, grab £17 (or $26.35) and head on over to their Steam page to check it out, see you there.
REVIEW CODE: A complimentary PC code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk
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