Conscript Review

Conscript’s opening moments confidently establish its dire tone. As the battle of Verdun rages on, you take on the role of a French soldier making his way to the frontlines accompanied by artillery blasts. Brief exchanges with your comrades and the sight of wounded allies betray the urgency of the situation. It’s not long then until you start splitting the skulls of invading German soldiers with one thing on your mind: you and your brother’s survival.

These initial moments manage to establish the stakes for the protagonist and those around him, doing a lot of the heavy lifting for what’s otherwise a flawed, uneven survival horror experience.

Droning noises entangled with desperate shouts join muddy, pixelated visuals to create a thick, oppressive atmosphere. Your character moves around slowly and needs to take time to charge attacks and aim his weapon. The importance of properly managing your limited stamina becomes clear the first time you face off against an enemy covered in steel armor – a veritable titan of war that tests your ability to dodge attacks.

Conscript doesn’t lack moments when it dials the intensity up to eleven, but although its individual parts tick all the boxes that made the survival horror games of yore great, they fail to come together into one harmonious, memorable whole that actively spurs you on to face its would-be horrors.

After the German assault succeeds, you wake up in a pile of bodies, with few supplies and a pistol conveniently dropped on the ground nearby. Enemy soldiers patrol the trenches that your forces once held, and you have to not only stay alive and figure out what happened to your brother but also find a way to reach your allies.

It’s a fairly traditional setup that branches off into exploring your surroundings. You gradually discover more supplies and items that all too quickly fill your limited bag space. You pick up notes that may or may not help nudge you in the right direction. You’ll also bump into multiple locked doors, which you’ll need to return to later after acquiring the right key or item that helps you unlock them.

Find a safe room and you’ll notice the familiar face of a friendly vendor alongside a storage crate and a journal that allows you to save your game. Exploration plays a big part in Conscript which, without a doubt, is at its best when it lets you uncover the ravages of war and piece together what happened to your comrades in the aftermath of the German assault.

You recover your first gas mask from a badly wounded soldier whose fate you seal to ensure your survival. Every now and then, you’ll find a broken opponent waiting for someone to grant them the sweet release of death. Much like encountering your first armored foe or becoming infected after a run-in with a ravenous swarm of rats, you will find other powerful moments sprinkled here and there.

Unfortunately, Conscript’s combat mechanics soon interfere. Although you have access to several types of melee and ranged weapons, actually using them feels slow and janky. Up close, you can opt for swift strikes or charged melee attacks that deal more damage. The latter, however, renders you vulnerable and can also be interrupted by enemies who – unlike you – didn’t skip the class that taught them how to kick foes in the stomach.

Firearms can swiftly dispatch enemies from afar, but reloading them is too cumbersome. In practice, these elements should encourage tactical play and carefully deciding when to engage opponents and when to hide. With more than one enemy breathing down your neck – which often happens in tight or enclosed spaces – something as simple as cocking the hammer of your revolver becomes a Sisyphean task, leaving you very few options.

Up close, you can’t always tell whether or not a hit will land. I died countless times to a single rat – that with one single bite can infect you, permanently halving your HP until you use disinfectant – because swinging my trench shovel somehow missed while the creature’s bite didn’t.

Firearms can also randomly miss as enemies get closer and, while this might be a means of simulating the stress of such an encounter, it all too often forces you into Benny Hill-esque chases around small areas, as you desperately attempt to put enough distance between you and your pursuers to attempt another shot.

Conscript’s controls and mechanics try to enforce the fantasy of being a lone soldier behind enemy lines, but they’re janky enough to not do it any favors. They not only turn melee duels into repetitive exchanges from the very first hour but, worse yet, guarantee a series of unnecessarily frustrating deaths that force you to repeatedly retrace your steps while hoping that you get luckier with landing your shots or timing your dodges next time.

Although you cannot change your base difficulty once you start a playthrough, an adaptable difficulty system does seem to scale down enemy health upon repeated deaths. Sadly, even with the optional checkpoint setting turned on, going through the same battle multiple times while also wrestling with the controls manages to wipe out any shred of tension while keeping horror well at bay.

Unless you like near-masochism levels of challenge, it’s also hard to fathom playing without checkpoints turned on or while attaching an item cost to saving your game in special safe rooms (both options you can toggle on or off before starting).

In theory, you can employ more creative solutions to both the German and rodent problems. The former’s raids can be slowed down by using barbed wire on designated parapets. Similarly, chucking a grenade inside the holes from where rats come should result in them no longer appearing in certain areas, but that doesn’t guarantee enemies will cease respawning which, in turn, makes it difficult to want to explore the game’s levels.

The issue here is that, on Soldier difficulty (intended for a first playthrough), these resources, much like bag space, are anything but plentiful. You have to carefully consider what you want to take with you before setting out and can end up retracing your steps several times to collect everything in a single area, all while risking getting infected or dying, which gets old rather quickly.

When facing a swarm of rats or several human opponents, I could spill fuel on the ground, and then use a lighter to set the puddle alight. Whether or not my pursuers died in the fire felt entirely up to chance, while the delay between completing the actions in the menu and the blaze taking shape often helped the rats get their meal by setting myself on fire. In addition, properly gauging how to accurately throw grenades or fire bombs feels equally tricky.

Conscript’s blurred pixelated graphics undoubtedly help instill atmosphere, however, they don’t facilitate crafting a mental map of the places you visit. It’s all different flavors of grey-brown trench which, while appropriate for the setting, led me to heavily rely on bringing up the in-game map for navigation (and thank Odin for the option to toggle on room names).

There were several points during my playthrough when I had to check every door in the area to see whether a new key I found might be able to open it because the game is rather stingy with advice on where to go next.

Not holding one’s hand can fit very well into the context of being a soldier trapped in a hostile environment and needing to adapt. But seeing as Conscript’s frustrating combat and slow movement discourage natural exploration, I found myself lost on a few occasions and not quite willing to leave my hidey hole to figure out which room had the item that let me progress the story.

This culminated with a bugged critical puzzle that brought my progress to a halt and forced me to restart the whole game. The publisher notes that this issue (which should have theoretically only impacted the console versions of the game) alongside others will be fixed in a day one patch, but it was enough to stop me from wrapping up the story in time for the embargo.

Aside from this unfortunate event, the more grounded puzzles add a touch of flavor to what’s a pretty standard element of the genre (find fuel for a lighter to be able to burn away rope covered in oil; find and combine two pieces of a wire cutter to gain access to an area behind a door covered in barbed wire), but even if they gradually open up the game’s interconnected trenches, they’re not particularly memorable.