5 reasons you should be playing The Great War: Western Front

You can probably see where we’re going with this. The team at Petroglyph have made a World War I game, allowing you to experience trench warfare like never before. It’s called The Great War: Western Front™, it’s recently been published by Frontier Foundry, and we’re going to run through some of the key reasons to check this game out below! Regardless of your experience level with historical or tactical games, we think you’ll be impressed.

5. Soak up the historical authenticity

The first point we’d like to stress is that the team at Petroglyph have really done their homework here. In fact, they’ve even worked extensively with the Imperial War Museums to ensure that everything in the game is as historically accurate as possible.

You’ll feel this authenticity from the ground up in every facet of the game, from the beautifully realised opening cut scenes that explain the overarching history, to archive photos that appear between missions, right down to the minute details of the artillery you’ll be able to deploy in battle. You’ll even hear licensed music from the era at certain points. More on that in a moment.

The game offers a vast number of places to do battle on the Western Front, all based on real places of course, with a sizeable map where you can do everything imaginable – spying on your enemies, moving resources around, plotting your next move and ultimately deciding the right time to strike.

4. See the action from two sides

While some games might force you to pick one perspective and never break from it, Petroglyph has taken a different approach with The Great War: Western Front™. Through the ‘dual-role commander’ system, you’ll build a deep understanding of the machinations behind the scenes, as well as experiencing the thrilling moment-to-moment action of the boots on the ground.

In the wide and turn-based theatre of war, as the handy tutorial will teach you, you’ll be able to see how much ground is currently occupied by the Allied Nations and how much has been taken by the Central Powers – you can pick either side to play as, and you can send reinforcements where you think they’re needed (budget allowing), all the while keeping an eye on your forces’ National Will. Depleting it all the way to zero is one way to lose the war, so you won’t want to forget that!

When a battle kicks off, your perspective changes and the gameplay shifts from turn-based to real-time. No longer are you the all-powerful pencil pusher with the ability to make big decisions on a global scale. Now you’re trapped on a battlefield, trying to decide where is best to station your troops in the trenches, weighing up the risk versus reward of bombing runs, far-seeing blimps, artillery fire and going over the top. As the enemy advances, you’ll feel the fear, but hopefully you have something ingenious up your sleeve to counter with.

3. Surround yourself with a stunning soundscape

It’s worth taking a moment to revel in quite how great the audio element of this game is, too. As we mentioned earlier, there is licensed music from the era that will play at the end of each battle, which really adds an extra layer of excitement to the big wins you’ve engineered, as well as tapping into that all-important authenticity.

There’s also a full orchestral score, mastered at the legendary Abbey Road, which was composed by much-loved muso Frank Klepacki. He’s previously worked extensively in the Command and Conquer™ series, as well as the aforementioned Star Wars: Empire at War™, and here he’s put a real focus on melody as opposed to the painfully loud dirge that sometimes scores war movies and blockbuster trailers these days.

Every effort has been made behind the scenes to make sure that the battles sound right, too, as well as having historically accurate details in a visual sense. This audio authenticity, Klepacki’s score, and the era-appropriate victory music combine to create a soundscape that you’ll never want to block out with a podcast or playlist.

2. Relive historic moments - or redefine them

As we touched upon earlier, The Great War: Western Front™ allows you to experience World War I from both sides of the conflict, and the game doesn’t put any restrictions on who can win which battle based on the historical results. As much as you could orchestrate a painfully realistic version of the conflict if you wanted to, you can also explore what could have happened differently.

What if the Germans put more of a focus on tanks? What if key clashes went the other way? What if every single soldier abandoned the idea of waiting in the trenches and charged mindlessly towards their objectives instead? You can try any of these scenarios out, although you’ll likely find that some of your ideas wouldn’t have resulted in cheery outcomes.

You’ll be able to explore the possibilities in World War I in a number of different game modes: there’s the main campaign, which comes with a lengthy-but-optional tutorial; there’s the Historical Battles mode that lets you relive pivotal battles from the Western Front; there’s the Skirmish mode, where you can create your own battle scenarios; and there’s also the Multiplayer mode, where you can test out your skills against other real-life players. With all of those options, and numerous ways to approach every single encounter, you could say the game has endless replayability.

1. Experience trench warfare like never before

We’ve saved the best until last here! World War I was famously a war of inches, where victories were hard won and battalions could get pinned down without much hope to sustain them. This focus on grimly drawn-out trench warfare is probably why there has never been a great World War I tactics game before, but now that’s all changed.

As much as you can send forces over the top or call in an air strike if you wish, the game’s most impressive feature is its detailed adaptation of trench combat. In your pre-battle preparation stage, you’ll decide where to set up your lines of defence, and you can also place some smaller communications trenches to connect them up. As you line up more sophisticated tactics, you’ll even be able to dig under your enemy’s position to place explosives underneath key locations.

This rendition of trench warfare is easy to learn but tricky to master, and it adds a whole new dimension to gameplay, forcing you to think in the mindset of the era rather than going in all guns blazing. The game is worth checking out for this feature alone, and it will be interesting to see how players use it against each other in multiplayer. Certainly, it’s worth checking out for any history buff that loves their games, or even more casual gamers that just want to try something new. We’ve never played the Great War in a way that felt so real.

The Great War: Western Front is out now on PC. Learn more.