The Great War: Western Front™ Reviews

TL;DR. While I don't think this game is worth $35, I think this game is worth $20, and it's often on sale. Get it on sale. You can easily not do the grind. You can easily just have fun with it as the war crime WW1 simulator you didn't know that you wanted ever since you played that Warfare 1917 flash game on Kongregate. In midst of Mixed rating and many negative reviews, I would to come forward with what I liked about this game, address some of the criticisms, and then present some of my own criticism. Hopefully this will be helpful to those wanting to know if this game is worth your time. This game scratched an itch for me that I didn't realize I had. I love playing the field battles in the later Total War games. But I don't like playing the siege battles with walls (with exception of Shogun 2). I also don't like how blobby and ugly the combat gets when the units collide. But in Great War, you are most often assaulting layers of enemy's defensive dug-down position. When your men is about to come under fire, you time the artillery, you time the charge, you hit unpause. Then the battlefield becomes ugly, dirty pandemonium of hundreds of gunfire and men fighting in trenches. And it feels just right. It's the cup of WW1 experience I ordered. Two points of criticism that's often brought up: It's too grindy for its own good, and the AI is pretty bad. I don't disagree. It is a buggy game with some deeply flawed design. Buuuuut, you can still have a lot of fun with it if you think about it more like a progressing sandbox rather than doing what the game tells you to do. The game sort of tells you that the objective is to take the enemy capital. Don't sweat it. That's the grindy way to win. You're going to win by National Will anyways, trust me. Personally, I think the value of this game is experimenting with its various mechanics on the battlefield and messing around. After you get the feels for how to attack trenches down, try out the following. Use only light artillery. Or spam heavy artillery barrages with balloon oversight. Or when you finally get around to tanks, don't use artillery at all and spam 10 tanks and 15 human wave, jumping from point to point. That last one is dumb and it's awesome. And when the AI attack, don't do the meta trenches. Do trenches that span the entire width of the map like proper WW1. Or do weird ones like a donut. Make those cement bunkers that can hold 5 units in and hide Gurkhas in there. Become a war criminal and design trap trenches to fill with chem clouds. There's a lot of possibilities you can toy with that you can't really in other games. That's my sell. You're going to find out at some point that the AI is subject to the same supply rules, and that if you keep beating them, they're going to be bled dry and they don't attack. Just skip forward a few turns to let them recover. Just auto-resolve fights you're going to lose. Hell, I even just conceded the entire battle. Again, there's no reason to get worried over National Will. And do this so that you can research the stuff you want faster. This is a game that you can easily circumvent the grind and actually have fun. Now, to the criticism that there's no going around. This game has not been updated since 2023, which is disappointing because this could be a GREAT game worth $35. There are missing features like campaign multiplayer, ability to undig trenches, etc. Vast majority of quests are crap and meaningless. Tanks become overpowered once you research auto-heal. Airplanes are really lackluster compared to tanks and artillery and need something going for them. Your infantry units being sniped when they are nowhere close to the frontline is asinine. I also imagine a game that could be so much more, a WW1 game where you control the difficulty, not by buffing the enemy's soldiers, but by choosing to go down in alternate history paths. Imagine playing as Germany and saying "yeah in this timeline, Russia didn't fall so we don't get reinforcement from the Eastern Front, but also America joined because the Zimmerman Telegram still happened." That could be so much more interesting and engaging achievements. But in midst of that disappointment, I think this game is pretty good, and people should buy it so that they make a sequel with proper mechanics and balancing, or at least encourage the WW1 strategy genre.

Challenging on Elite or Custom settings - a bit repetitive from time to time but a good number of maps with different challenging features. Good to see that fire and maneouvre wins the day.

Good game, got it on sale for 5 bucks, easily worth.

A game that had a good premise but over all bad AI in both battles and campaign make it feel extremely unfair or utterly boring. Had high hopes for what it could have been at release but im officially calling it bad now.

This game does what very few games do, accurately give you an authentic WW1 strategy experience. It is a grueling, frustrating, horrific slog, and you will lose massive amounts of your troops to take just inches of ground at a time. Unfortunately for me, this isn't something I want to play. I wasn't expecting it to be so... authentic in how frustrating and slow of a grind it is to make any progress against the enemy. Hammering the enemy with heavy artillery only to find that the enemy is still very much there and you lose entire waves of infantry assaults is very authentic to a WW1 experience, but for a seasoned strategy game player like me, its ragequit inducing to lose entire divisions of troops to an area you timed to raid after hammering with dedicated artillery strikes. Aside from my own strategy grievances, it's disappointing and boring to have to fight on the same map every single engagement in the game's campaign, whereas skirmish mode has multiple maps to choose from. There are mods that fix this, but this should be a basegame feature. This game isn't for me, but it isn't a bad game at all. I see what it's trying to do, and it does it decently well; I'm just not a fan of it myself and I'll be requesting a refund while leaving a recommendation for thsoe who want an authentic WW1 strategy experience.

This game is a unique and troubling reflection on WW1. Before playing this game, I often wondered how WW1 generals could commit so many millions to slaughter. After my second play through, I realized I was doing the same thing. We need to capture this new objective dictated by the government? Send in 8 divisions. We only lost 2 on trainee mode, so victory. It was not until that fateful second play through that I understood. This game is not a game as you would traditionally understand it. It's a perfectly fun strategy game in its own right. There are countless gripes I could bring up. But every time I begin to complain, the nagging specter of history stops me. The AI is easily thrown off, commits forces in suicidal actions, and is easily bogged down. Similar to countless WW1 generals. The supply system is frustrating and exorbitantly difficult to triage; as was the sustainment of the great war. The maps get samey and you often find yourself fighting on the same maps; similar to how there were over 3 battles at Arras. This game is the most brutal examination of the hardest part of the first world war: the vicious reality of commanding thousands to their deaths, with no good solutions and no good plan. Even with the hindsight of history, this game will have you committing to the same insanity of Hague, Ludendorf, and von Moltke before you realize it. I recommend this game to any history buff and strategy game fan. Paired with a listen through of Blueprint to Armageddon, you will find yourself learning and experiencing at a level previously unachievable.

Took 17 hours to finish trainee campaign. Gameplay is actually pretty good, performance is not so good, max graphics are 'bad' to mid, the game is clearly a bit unoptimised. I really like how you actually feel and *see* the tens of thousands of lives you throw away like paper each battle. You also really notice how the entire game completely changes with the introduction of things like armor, better artillery, aircraft etc, which I really liked, so it's not at all repetetive per se. Which is (imo) the largest problem many games of this kind seem to suffer from. The game clearly has good artistic soul put into it, something you actually notice even if you're not looking for it. I have more hours/enjoyment to get out of this game, I also bought it at a big discount. Tl;dr: It's a pretty good game but don't expect the greatest graphics. I reccomend buying at a discount.

Where do I start? Grueling. Slogging. Frustrating. Slow progression. Heavy casualties. Slow. Methodical. Horrifying. Honestly, the most accurate great war game out there. Exactly as terrible as you’d want it to be. This is how it should be!

I like the mechanics, I like the battle concepts, but I don't understand why you wouldn't make the campaign multiplayer...The biggest gripe is AI, and just being able to play the campaign against someone would totally fix that.

Has a lot of potential that will likely never be realized, but it's still a fun game. Just try to get it on sale