The Great War: Western Front highlights one of the most significant wars in human history, showcasing its devastating toll on life, tactics, and strategy through a combination of turn-based and real-time gameplay.
Last year, we had the opportunity to play The Great War: Western Front during the (historical) Battle of Passchendaele and recently we got a deeper look into the game, allowing us to look at its tutorial and campaign mode.
The tutorial is packed with information about the game’s major concepts and their subtleties. It’s delivered via text boxes that made it fairly easy to feel overwhelmed, at least with a limited amount of time at our disposal.
Some missions were accompanied by actions we had to perform or UI elements to examine. Although they provided helpful information, they couldn’t replace the learning-by-doing approach on the battlefield, which unfortunately resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives.
From there, we jumped straight into The Great War’s campaign, which put us in the role of Theater Commander. During our time with it, we got to play as the Allied side fighting over a small chunk of Europe around France and Belgium. We had to oversee both the strategy across the whole front and fight individual battles whenever one erupted.
A clear view of the frontline.
The map’s dark hues and line of soldier figurines across the front line effectively conveyed the feeling of being a decision-maker in one of history’s most infamous conflicts.
As Theater Commander, I got a clear overview of the battlefield but had to work with partial information, at least initially. The map is split into hexes, each one representing a region that either side of the conflict can attack, provided it has troops on an adjacent hex.
The gameplay on this screen is turn-based, allowing factions to recruit and move units, select research priorities, and upgrade regions with structures like airfields, first aid tents, or supply depots during their turn. Having to balance gold reserves, which accumulate each turn, and supplies (global and regional) while monitoring enemy advances along the frontlines was a constant challenge during our preview session.
Setting up and upgrading defenses just before battle.
We could acquire additional airplanes and tanks with the resources available, but the core of our army, infantry, was only gained through progress in the campaign or by fulfilling optional objectives that appeared periodically.
Although I didn’t get a clear picture of how easy it is to recover from major losses, I was inevitably thrust into both smaller and larger battles, which I could opt to auto-resolve or fight myself.
In preparation, espionage actions were vital to getting a better idea of the forces I was going up against. The first action performed each turn is guaranteed to succeed, with all the others having an increased risk of failure and locking you out of attempting more for the remainder of your turn.
These actions do cost supply from the global pool but help remove the disadvantage of partial information or thwart enemy attempts to gather information of their own. It doesn’t take a seasoned general to realize that heading into battle against overwhelming odds is rarely a good idea. Each region in The Great War: Western Front has a set amount of stars that determine its defensive capabilities. To conquer it, you’ll need to deplete all of its stars, which is achieved through great victories.
Occasionally, events have you decide between different courses of action.
The game determines the type of victory based on the battle performance of both sides. Unless you’re attacking a region from multiple fronts, you’ll have to fight multiple turns over a single one before you can plant your flag in its soil.
One star regenerates each turn if no combat takes place in the region, promoting continued aggression while also forcing each side to allocate some forces that could be useful elsewhere. It can be a tight tug-of-war battle to achieve victory. If one combatant proves to be too strong, the other can offer a ceasefire.
While great victories are highly sought after, even stalemates and small wins can impact the overall war effort. They not only determine the number of casualties, but also have an effect on National Will, which measures the level of public support for the war. Depleting your enemy’s National Will is, actually, one way to win the campaign. The other involves taking their command headquarters. During my session, these buildings were located in heavily defended regions like Paris and Kreuznach.
Ordering troops to attack an adjacent region.
On the campaign map, events can randomly spring up, asking you to take difficult decisions. The messages offered era-appropriate context – such as noting citizens protesting in front of important buildings away from the front – while, in practice, the decisions boiled down to stuff like trading additional National Will for extra supply or vice-versa.
The Great War: Western Front’s campaign is also a bit of a slower burn than the tutorial might suggest, as it doesn’t grant access to everything you’re introduced to right from the start. Unlocking units like observation balloons and more advanced offensive options, such as powerful explosives that can be placed prior to battle, allowing you to potentially blow up enemy defenses without risking casualties requires spending research points that are slowly gained over time.
Early on, we were limited to more basic infantry and simple artillery support. This did make battles less complex but still required us to carefully decide the direction from which we launched attacks and provide adequate support to our units. This approach could also help make for a less overwhelming experience that eases you into The Great War: Western Front’s mechanics at a more manageable pace, before you’re asked to properly aim rolling barrages, time troop movements, and plan air missions on enemy targets as the enemy’s men rush to push you out of your trenches.
While not mandatory, completing objectives rewards you with valuable resources.
The small chunk of the campaign that we got to sample successfully captured the slower pace at which territory shifted hands in World War I as well as the meat grinder into which soldiers were thrown. After this, we then got to experience another of The Great War: Western Front’s historical battles, leading the Central Powers during The Battle of the Somme.
Moving on from the campaign, we then got to sample one of The Great War: Western Front’s historical battles, leading the Central Powers during The Battle of the Somme. As opposed to the campaign, where we placed down and upgraded trenches and defenses ourselves, this was a handcrafted scenario with preset defensive positions and set objectives dictating its flow.
The Battle of the Somme started with the German positions separated by entrenched Allies. Initially, we had to use emplaced machine guns, infantry, and artillery to hold back attacks against two different control points on both sides of the allied lines. We did the mistake of focusing most of our troops on one side but, thankfully, were given a small number of units on both objectives, which ended up seeing us through.
Charging into the unknown.
Spotting units garrisoned in fortified trenches from where they could not fire back proved tricky, causing the otherwise avoidable loss of a few of our artillery positions. I’m still not entirely sure if it was a UI issue or if it came down to the streaming software used for this preview, which occasionally made the visuals rather muddy.
After repelling assaults for a couple of minutes by softening the enemy with artillery before our men wiped out the remainder of the units, we got to choose between a set of ground and air reinforcements. Shortly after, I was on the offensive, tasked to conquer an enemy position so that our lines were no longer separated. Aside from differently positioned trenches and emplacements, the main difference between Somme and Passchendaele came in the shape of having to both defend and attack from multiple sides.
Research unlocks new technology and improvements for your faction.
With only three artillery pieces left – each with its own limited angle of fire – I could only cover one side with a rolling barrage, which may or may not have doomed some four hundred of our men to being shredded by machinegun fire. But, as they say, war requires sacrifice, so it definitely wasn’t my incompetence killing lots of people yet again.
I eventually took the position, after which we had to hold both initial points against a new, stronger wave of attacks. Although The Battle of the Somme didn’t do a lot that was fundamentally different from what we had already seen, being attacked from several directions kept us on my toes.
The battle also had bonus objectives that asked you to perform offensive actions like taking down enemy balloons by destroying the vehicles supporting them or capturing an enemy control point. The MG nests defending them made me a bit reticent to try it on my first run.
Defending during The Battle of the Somme.
They encourage replayability, and I could see how taking on the extra challenge might become appealing once you have a better sense of how the main objectives play out. The Great War: Western Front gives you plenty of things to consider both on a strategic and tactical level while successfully recreating the arduous effort and cost of lives that went into taking a small chunk of land during the period it explores.
I felt relieved to see a hard-fought battle over an enemy command point come to an end with the foe routed as I was hanging by my last points of supply. A few minutes more and we wouldn’t have been able to reinforce our troops. On the flip side, the ruthless meat grinder took the lives of at least a thousand of our men. One turn later, I would also be returning to the same trench networks to fight the battle again, as long as the enemy didn’t ruin these plans with his own moves.
The drip-feed of research points in the campaign has the potential to provide a steadily increasing amount of interesting technologies to use, although you cannot unlock everything during a single run, which helps keep the game’s complexity manageable.
A view of the battlefield.
The “static” element of The Great War: Western Front’s battles is also shaken up by how the game uses different maps depending on the direction from which you attack a region.
I just hope that the push-and-pull of capturing territory – or sapping your enemy’s National Will until the people at home force capitulation – doesn’t end up being as drawn out and morale-sapping as the real-life conflict was. We’ll find out when The Great War: Western Front launches on March 30.
Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing how battles change as you research more technology in the full campaign.
