I try go into every game with the exact same attitude, I will try my hardest to love the game, but at the same time not get blinded by the obvious flaws that impedes the experience. A few years back I forced myself through a school term of work knowing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Gates to Infinity was at the end waiting for me during the holidays. I had every reason to love the game, I love Pokemon, loved every Mystery Dungeon up till that point, and that game was the pillar of inspiration I held onto the entire term. I lied to myself for a good 3 days that I was enjoying what the game was putting out for me, but after those 3 days I broke and stopped playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon ever since. From that day onward I refused to get hyped for any game, and I feel that skepticism is well justified considering how disappointing many titles I looked forward to failed so terribly in recent years.
So on came Valiant Hearts: The Great War. I was quite excited to play it, and for the first 4 hours all so I honestly quite enjoyed it. But when the puzzles started repeating themselves, all the problems started becoming obvious to me.
This game is terribly dull - not a single puzzle can be considered fun and some like the button QTEs are overly simplistic and annoying. The puzzles are very, very brainless, consisting of mostly QTEs, fetch quests, and reaction puzzles. Any puzzle you are unable to solve is probably due to bad game design; for instance, there was one puzzle in Chapter 3 where you needed to create a diamond shaped object, I handed in a square and was denied, and only the diamond is accepted. The characters' individual 'powers' make little sense, because apparently only the old grandpa with the big ladle can dig through mud but the muscular soldier cannot pick up a shovel and do the same, or why does one character has a pair of pliers that never breaks while all the others can only pick up one use pliers to force the problems unto the player instead of presenting interesting puzzles. This necessity for detailed solutions shows how lack of attention to details game designers gave it. Thankfully the game is very forgiving with checkpoints, and frequent deaths due to unfair situations can be forgiven. Simple and forgiving however, makes a good game for children.
This game is terribly dull - not a single puzzle can be considered fun and some like the button QTEs are overly simplistic and annoying. The puzzles are very, very brainless, consisting of mostly QTEs, fetch quests, and reaction puzzles. Any puzzle you are unable to solve is probably due to bad game design; for instance, there was one puzzle in Chapter 3 where you needed to create a diamond shaped object, I handed in a square and was denied, and only the diamond is accepted. The characters' individual 'powers' make little sense, because apparently only the old grandpa with the big ladle can dig through mud but the muscular soldier cannot pick up a shovel and do the same, or why does one character has a pair of pliers that never breaks while all the others can only pick up one use pliers to force the problems unto the player instead of presenting interesting puzzles. This necessity for detailed solutions shows how lack of attention to details game designers gave it. Thankfully the game is very forgiving with checkpoints, and frequent deaths due to unfair situations can be forgiven. Simple and forgiving however, makes a good game for children.
As a student of history myself, the factoids and trivia is interesting to look at, but honestly does little to the story but you can argue it is there to sell the anti-war message. It gets a little annoying when the aesthetic choices used for the game and the 'facts' section are different, but overall the choice of style is much appreciated. The music is mostly spot on, but when an upbeat tune plays when I'm the Frenchman bombing the Germans I'm not really sure whether I'm getting the anti-war message or not. With remixed classical tunes and some well composed new tracks, I have to say I am a fan of the music in this game.
The characters are likeable, they have some nice backstories and developments throughout the game but there is nothing exceptional and memorable about any of them. Sometimes the use of French, English, German and Belgian in certain situations between certain characters makes sense, but sometimes they don't. And it will make you wondering why two particular characters are not communicating in French instead of English considering the setting. The Diaries section is an interesting addition, but I would have liked to have more entries for more interesting character development. They are mostly there to summarised what happened, in case you put down the game too long and forgot - I think they would have served greater purposes in storytelling if better implemented. I can't comment much about voice acting, but I really liked how Emile's lines were delivered.
The collectibles contribute absolutely nothing to the story, and I feel they are just added to pretend that there is a replay element when there really is not. If you need a game that has a lot of padding to distract your children, tell them they have to collect all the collectibles and remember some of the factoids to get a present. Sometimes, these trinkets you collect are immersion breaking too - why would you bend down and collect a small trinket amidst gunfire, or running to save someone crying for help? For a 'completionist' run one would have to ignore all logic in situation and try to search for places that these meaningless items are hidden, why such an option is added is puzzling. All it is, I think, is useless padding to make the game seem longer.
The collectibles contribute absolutely nothing to the story, and I feel they are just added to pretend that there is a replay element when there really is not. If you need a game that has a lot of padding to distract your children, tell them they have to collect all the collectibles and remember some of the factoids to get a present. Sometimes, these trinkets you collect are immersion breaking too - why would you bend down and collect a small trinket amidst gunfire, or running to save someone crying for help? For a 'completionist' run one would have to ignore all logic in situation and try to search for places that these meaningless items are hidden, why such an option is added is puzzling. All it is, I think, is useless padding to make the game seem longer.
The story, love it or hate it, is completely devastated by poor game design. Emotions sessions are padded with boring puzzles that breaks up continuity, and doing the same old chores simply makes one feel frustrated, but not frustrated in the way the story wants you to feel. Bugs and the distraction of collectibles aside, the lack of attention to scenes, characters and puzzle design is especially disruptive to immersion because that makes up the bulk of the game. There is a part where your character is supposed to pick up the pliers from the floor at the midst of battle, if you press the action button but miss the sweet-spot you have to stand on to prompt the action, your character will scratch his chin and think - all in the midst of heavy gunfire - like he does during other puzzling moments. Why was this overlooked? How could this have been overlooked? This constant immersion breaking experience is probably the worst sin this game has committed. I tried killing the dog, throwing grenade at people, but the world seems to ignore it and never had I gotten a gameover screen other than getting the character you control killed. You can't kill anything in this game. Drive the tank in chapter 3 and do the logical thing and fire the cannon at the German soldiers - guess what - nothing happens. Good games send anti-war messages by forcing the player to make painful decisions that would not have been necessary if it was not because of war, and make players regret the decisions they make, make them feel pain for the people they killed and the buildings they destroyed. Turning everyone invincible to the devastating elements of war and battle, or making the characters unable to pick up weapons and gun down enemies to save their own lives when it makes perfect sense to do so, is not the way to deliver the message.
The narrative in this game is so atrocious that the game feels like an afterthought than an integral part of the plot. It seems like the developers were thinking, how do we make this game an arbitrary length long so that it can justify the price tag, instead of thinking of how the game-play can help to complement the story. There is so much wrong with the narrative that I don't think the game should have been made in the first place. It was a very disturbing experience for me, but probably not in the way the developers wanted. I wrote this review concurrently while playing the game, not because I wanted to write a review, but I felt the need for a rant every time the game breaks me out of the immersion. As for the story, I think it is good, the message is good, but it is honestly nothing exceptional and I would have rewritten some parts of the ending just to knit together some game-play elements and the story to better create that devastating sensation felt from the quote uttered at the end "War makes men mad". The game has a message, but it is as though the developers did not understand that message themselves at all. Chapter 4 is probably the best chapter, but the whole game could have been condensed into a much shorter experience to make Chapter 4 feel more impactful - because a bored man can't feel any other emotions, he just feels bored.
The narrative in this game is so atrocious that the game feels like an afterthought than an integral part of the plot. It seems like the developers were thinking, how do we make this game an arbitrary length long so that it can justify the price tag, instead of thinking of how the game-play can help to complement the story. There is so much wrong with the narrative that I don't think the game should have been made in the first place. It was a very disturbing experience for me, but probably not in the way the developers wanted. I wrote this review concurrently while playing the game, not because I wanted to write a review, but I felt the need for a rant every time the game breaks me out of the immersion. As for the story, I think it is good, the message is good, but it is honestly nothing exceptional and I would have rewritten some parts of the ending just to knit together some game-play elements and the story to better create that devastating sensation felt from the quote uttered at the end "War makes men mad". The game has a message, but it is as though the developers did not understand that message themselves at all. Chapter 4 is probably the best chapter, but the whole game could have been condensed into a much shorter experience to make Chapter 4 feel more impactful - because a bored man can't feel any other emotions, he just feels bored.
I applaud the team for trying to do a non-FPS war game, but as the game stands now it should have just been at most a graphic novel and not a stealth-puzzle game. The puzzle style can work, because there are parts where the interactive elements of the game actually contributes to the narrative, such as the final battle in Chapter 4. Having a good plot is important, but having little to no game-play elements to support that plot almost makes this title a non-game. The experience feels toned down and censored, prepared for mass consumption but cannot be considered a breakthrough because of the extremely poor narrative. Valiant effort, but still not enough effort.
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