Once you stop dying (or should I say, once I stopped dying) every five seconds - complete with its twenty-plus second respawn timer - some of Verdun's more nuanced systems come into play. This does mean you're often sat, in a brown ditch, for minutes at a time, doing almost nothing, but life is about winning sometimes and this is what you have to do to win. For starters, it becomes pretty clear that getting out of the trenches is a terrible idea. You can click the left stick to hold your breath and steady your rifle, but so often your sights will skip straight past an enemy's head, and you'll be a crumpled heap on the ground once again.Ī terrible first, second and third impression, then, but Verdun does eventually start to make sense, and a kind of loose, mediocre kind of enjoyment starts to creep in. Low resolution and detail aren't necessarily problems, especially in a low budget game, but an aim that stutters and jumps really is.
The finishing blow comes from dealing with the game's ropey technical elements. Expect to die hundreds of times by peeking your head out of a trench and immediately dropping dead with no idea how or why.
Everyone looks the same, and teammates are only highlighted when you literally aim-down-sights at them, so expect to be shot at constantly by people on your side (there's no friendly fire, at least).Ĭompounding that madness is Verdun's deadly double-hit combo of one-hit-kills and no killcam. For starters, it's incredibly difficult to tell who the enemy are at first. It takes a good five or six matches (each over 30 minutes, remember) to get your head around Verdun, and that's because it just doesn't play like other shooters. After doing this four or five times, I was seriously considering deserting myself, straight into the warm arms of Battlefield 1. Pick the wrong one and you get executed for deserting. Often you'll have two conflicting markers on screen, one yelling 'Attack Here', while another, behind you, says 'Defend'. As mentioned, this pits two teams of 16 (split into four squads of four) against one another, in a to-and-fro tug of war, where one team must attack an enemy trench and then hold it for a period of time to advance, while the opposition tries to dig in, and then launch their own counterattack.Īt first, this is utterly baffling, as the seven-slide tutorial seems far more concerned in talking to you like an old English officer caricature (think Stephen Fry in Blackadder Goes Forth) rather than actually tell you what you need to be doing. The primary game mode, ignoring FFA and Team Deathmatch for a minute, is Frontlines. And while it's unfair to place the two side by side, as Verdun not only has a fraction of the budget but also costs a fraction of the price, it's very difficult to convince yourself that wading through a low-res trench for thirty minutes is worth your time when you could be slicing off heads on a horse.Įverything on its own merit, though, and Verdun must be praised for its ideas if not for its execution. While Verdun's timing is smart in some ways - capitalising on the whole World War I hype train, for want of a less ridiculous collection of words - it's impossible not to compare it to DICE's multi-million dollar behemoth. Set in an and around the major theatres of France, here two teams of 16 players battle for control of trenches, as they slowly push the frontline into enemy territory, scrapping for every inch of ground. Yes, on the same week as the Battlefield 1 beta, this tactically astute bit of retail scheduling promises a similar level of century-old combat, but Verdun offers an altogether more grounded, grim and grass-roots take on the Great War. I'm pretty sure I know which one I preferred. Nevertheless, it was only a few days after this unusual trip until I went to No Man's Land, courtesy of M2H and Blackmill Games' WWI squad shooter, Verdun. We even saw someone catch an egg that had been thrown over twenty metres. Upon arrival, it was fairly clear that there were actually plenty of men in Nomansland, and women too. And yet that's where I went, as the family and I hunted out a local village fete. I didn't know I was going to Nomansland, in fact I didn't know it even existed as anything other than a concept. With noble intentions but scrappy delivery, Verdun is a bit of a mess.
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