![]() ![]() ![]() Verdun’s unashamedly reckless approach to player mortality also seeps into the tactical core that lurks beneath its shooter stylings, and it is here that the Frontlines game mode excels. Verdun is many things, but forgiving is certainly not one of them. It’s not just bullets and bayonets that can put you six-feet under either, there are mustard gas attacks that require you to equip a gas mask lest you succumb to the sulphur toxins, and the always deadly barbed wire strewn around the environment to contend with too. Just poking your head up and over any trenchline feels like a perilous gamble, since all it takes is a single round, held tightly in its metal casing, plunging its way through your meaty torso to send you to the respawn screen. Harking back to that initial comparison with Rainbow Six Siege, Verdun’s larger, more open environments still retain a similar sense of claustrophobia helped unquestionably by the rigid, trench-based setting of its theatre of war. Of course it’s extremely likely that your enemies haven’t turned off their UI, but it remains a nice concession to authenticity to be able to do so all the same. One other nice touch is the ability to toggle the UI on or off, the latter resulting in a much more authentic experience where friend and foe alike must be identified by sight only and landmarks act as the sole means of environmental orientation. In both cases, it pays to know exactly what rifle you are using lest you get caught on the hop reloading, or worse, bereft of ammo altogether. Elsewhere, the wide variety of historically accurate firearms all handle wonderfully each possessing a distinct audible crack that deftly evokes their real-life counterparts while accommodating differing methods for reloading ammunition, with some that must be reloaded a round at a time, and others that can be loaded a whole cartridge at once. Because the majority of the rifles are driven by bolt-action mechanisms, it’s entirely possible for the sodding things to get jammed just when you don’t need it to, causing instant, pad-shaking panic when you’re faced with an enemy who requires a face full of hot lead. In game terms, this rigid adherence to the events of yesteryear brings tangible effects too. ![]() Devoid of the globe-spanning, adventurous conflict depicted in DICE’s forthcoming effort, Verdun instead concerns itself with the mud, grit and rotten plank-lined trenches that served as both salvation and damnation for those millions of soldiers who ran its gauntlet in the four years spanning from 1914 to 1918.įrom loading screens which provide real-life photographs and accounts of the battles that you can fight yourself, to an accurate take on the Christmas Truce of 1914 where both sides put down their guns and can share coffee, play football in the snow and send postcards back home to loved ones, it’s abundantly clear that the developer of Verdun is passionate about this period of history in a way that very few developers have been.Īudibly, Verdun manages to raise the bar too, with the pained screams of your comrades attempting to free their flesh from the savage embrace of mud-drenched barbed wire, coupled with the whistling of near-miss rounds, shouted orders and pounding artillery all coming together to create an audio cacophony of war quite unlike anything previously experienced on PlayStation. Indeed, a million miles away from the glitzy dubstep, Hollywood-infused trappings of EA’s Battlefield 1, the development team behind Verdun have instead elected to tell the tale of those soldiers for whom the trenches were a home away from home. Unlike Ubisoft’s more intimate take on the squad-based FPS however, Verdun expands its horizons, taking in a number of outdoor, historically accurate maps while allowing players to take control one of four different roles from a wide range of soldier brigades, pulled from the pages of history. ![]()
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