Two astronauts are dead. And they represent one of my greatest achievements in a video game.
Of course it's terrible that the two Kerbals--an entire species of little green alien men who feel like an unholy combination of the Minions from Despicable Me and the Irken race from Invader Zim--are dead. I managed to keep them alive through disaster after disaster, spending hours ensuring to their survival in the cold black of space. Test missions were flown; probes collected scientific data; rockets would refuse to leave the ground and would explode or launch and then immediately tip over because the balance was wrong. These two died based on the collective knowledge of a thousand failures. And it was beautiful because they died crashing into the Moon.
Sorry, the Mun.
It doesn't really cover it to say that Kerbal Space Program is a space sim. For one thing, no matter how serious things get, you're still playing in a world of little green cartoons, which the game never really reconciles with its overwhelming physical realism the further along you go. But for all the things that feel brain-bending and sciencey, there's still a mild sense of approachability, like the fact that trying to plot a flight path that puts you in orbit with a different planet is essentially a really touchy and precise game of Bop It. The game surpasses that categorization because of that sense of constant discovery and innovation. Making a mistake never felt like a punishment, as if the game had placed an insurmountable obstacle in front of me and laughed as I flailed wildly at it. It felt like growth. Failure is a teacher here, one that challenges you and doesn't compromise by handing you all the answers. But it is most certainly a teacher that wants nothing more than for you to find enlightenment.
As such, trying to nutshell Kerbal Space Program isn't a matter of straightforward "You win if you get here" goals. As far as I can tell, the game never stops, and an entire solar system waits out there to be explored. What KSP values above all is perseverance. Although all your scientists and pilots are little green men, the game is intrinsically human. You advance simply by being bold enough to try reaching a little higher, making your species' sphere of influence just a little larger with every attempt. If you manage to break the world's speed record, you're ready to try reaching the upper atmosphere and recording how the air is up there. If you get there, then maybe we can put a satellite even further. If the satellite can get up there, maybe an astronaut can. If we can reach space, we can reach our closest planetary neighbor. All that matters is that the experience is never wasted. Whether you transmit the knowledge using an antenna you attached to your spacecraft or you manage to land safely and the data can be recovered manually, Mission Control receives the experience, shown under a blanket stat of "Science" in-game. If the mission crashes and burns horribly, it is worthwhile as long as you recognize why.
Sitting in a tin can, far above the world.
Unsurprisingly, most of your time in-game is spent in the spaceport on a constant trial-and-error mode trying to build a craft that can do exactly what's required for the mission at hand. The game isn't going to blow your mind visually or aurally--land, sea, space are all relatively textureless and sparse, even with all the specs cranked up, and the sounds are about the same, with the soundtrack topping out at "playfully quirky" instead of awe-inspiring. All the horsepower has gone into making the fine kinetic details almost terrifyingly intricate. Virtually every aspect of a spaceship's design is accounted for here, with literally hundreds of design options and moving parts to assemble--from fuel tanks and rockets to the heat shields for re-entry and the decoupling devices for boosters. And you'd better take all of it into consideration or sure as you're born, it will crash and burn before you even see the stars. It's daunting, but starting small and adding new tech onto successful structures is where joy is found. The actual crafting process is dirt simple, however, because every part is basically attached to your craft like Legos. There's a slew of fine-tuning tools available for the more meticulous player, but it takes a long time before they become necessary evils.
Kerbal Space Program offers straightforward Easy-to-Hard difficulty settings, but in reality, the real difficulty setting is almost allegorical. The Sandbox mode opens up every available part in the game so you can just fool around and make the most elaborate, insane designs imaginable. The Science mode allows you to earn points for every new milestone achievement; you can spend those points on the Research and Development skill tree, which is where you earn bigger and better parts to use. The Career mode is a full-blown space program experience where money is, in fact, an object and good public opinion, public donations, government contracts, and farmed-out tech are required to before you can even afford to send astronauts on a flight. This is the most "gamey" it gets, with contracts representing clearly defined missions you can perform to get the most out of every flight. It's slow going, but it's possibly the most satisfying because every new advancement is earned.
You think if you spin the camera, there's a little green Michael Bay sitting behind it?
Both the Science and Sandbox modes feature pre-made spacecraft you can take out into the final frontier, but while it is a huge relief to not have to put in the clearly elaborate wrench time to build anything this complex, there's something a little hollow about just having these accomplishments tossed at you instead of reaching them yourself. The game almost makes up for this because even with a few extensive tutorials tossed in, getting a ship to the Mun involves a hundred tiny decisions you won't realize you're making because you don't have to make them time and time again. The stages of every launch have to be programmed in, sufficient fuel has to be stocked to make it where you're going and back, and ship stability has to be minded (even with the SAS feature, which is there for the express purpose of keeping your ship in balance). The blue navigation ball at the bottom of your screen is your best friend in the world, and ignoring it is a fool's act. Career mode is harder yet infinitely more satisfying when you find success. Even when you forge the most ridiculous-looking rocket, it's a wonder of engineering as long as it breaches Kerbal's atmosphere and doesn't explode. True human achievement, in life as in this game, works at a snail's pace. It can't be given.
Once you have your spacecraft, the real struggle begins. And your opponent is gravity.
Gravity keeps your craft from lifting off when you've loaded it down with too much rocket fuel. It tilts your ship as it takes off if the thrust is even a tiny angle off-kilter. You fight it in the upper atmosphere as you try to put spacecraft in orbit instead of watching them fall helplessly back to the ground. You will charge against it as you try to create a new orbital path to get to a new planet, and all the tutorials do is teach you the basic principles. They don't tell you what parts you need to make these things any easier in practice (in case you haven't figured it out, the tutorials are kinda useless).
You advance simply by being bold enough to try reaching a little higher, making your species' sphere of influence just a little larger with every attempt.
But this is simply nature in action. Unlike, say, Surgeon Simulator or one of the new breed of indie titles with sloppy, inebriate physics, KSP's natural laws feel like a natural part of the universe's uncaring nature instead of the developer's attempt to stymie progress. It's up to you to use the tech at your disposal to break nature's shackles and crack the science necessary. This is often an arduous, aggravating process, where hours slip away as you try to find the one flaw in an insanely elaborate series of maneuvers that's causing your missions to fail. The tiny moments when something clicks into place and one more of those chains breaks are the most breathtaking and gratifying of all. Once again, there's still even further you can go.
Kerbal Space Program was a beta release for years before this, its "final" version. Funny enough, even after all that time, bugs are still scattered throughout, such as ships that are no longer visible, orbital paths turning twitchy and changing randomly even as your ship follows the one you set, and button presses not registering as you float out of your ship . But these are small compared to what feels like the mass achievements of thousands of minds bringing their expertise to the table through the hundreds of tweaks done over the years to the clearly passionate, lovingly crafted mods, which are easily accessible and promoted in-game. Even NASA's gotten in on it with a few of their own hypothetical scenarios pre-loaded in the game from the get-go. On the micro and macro levels, Kerbal Space Program's greatest magic trick is giving the player a feeling of togetherness, that we all have the same curiosity required to transcend our limitations and that regardless of how Herculean the stakes, the constant idea is always "it can be done."
Liar. Nothing in this game is child's play.
You will fail at this game. It will demoralize you and it will stress you out, but, more often than not, it will soothe, quiet, and inspire you. Innovative muscles will be stretched here that aren't stretched very often by games, and more complex moments require a sort of zen beyond being simply twitch-ready for a surprise attack. Even failure imparts a lesson. No matter how big or small the achievement, anything else that can be done is limited only by your imagination. Even with its cartoonish humor and quirks, Kerbal Space Program has an almost sacred respect for the tiny miracles involved in space travel, and even at its most difficult, it deserves that respect in return.
Build your vocabulary and your putting skills with Vertiginous Golf. This sports game might be one of the most awkwardly titled releases of all time, but its bizarre blend of steampunk and mini-golf adds up to an experience that is almost as appealing as it is peculiar. The developers have created something truly unique here, mashing together the world's greatest first-date sport with steampunk Victoriana so that you can putt to your heart's content on courses in the clouds. And it all works, with the bizarre background and the elaborate design of the courses turning a familiar and predictable sport into something new and intriguing.
Floating islands high in the sky is the domain of Vertiginous Golf. The game is set in an alternate dimension where the upper crust dwell in a pristine cloud city called New Lun-donne while the plebs get by far below in the polluted burg of Scudborough. One of the only joys of being down on Earth is being able to hook up to a virtual reality gadget that uses electrical blasts to fire this vertigo-inducing golf game straight into your head. Gameplay itself, however, is grounded with rules that include fairly typical golf stroke play, speed rounds, arenas, and a driving range. Multiplayer support is offered both locally and over the net, although the empty servers sure seem to indicate that virtually nobody is playing the game online.
Story mode courses in Vertiginous Golf don't add much to gameplay...though they sure do bring the weird
No tour or career mode means that all matches are one-offs, and the three-course story mode telling the tale of a society revolt in Victrola-played snippets is a poor substitute. While these courses are spectacularly hard (it took me close to 100 shots to beat one of them on my first try), the dialogue is made up of annoying Clockwork Orange-styled future slang and sci-fi claptrap that's impossible to follow. Nothing you do on the greens affects the plot spinning away in the background, either, so forget about starting the revolution with a cool hole-in-one.
Only the cash made on each hole serves to tie things together, as it accumulates steadily regardless of the mode of play. These purses can be used to buy smart-looking clubs and clothes, although both are of questionable value. The clubs don't seem to improve your skills and the clothing is only visible when you're first sliding into the virtual reality machine, as the game is played with a first-person camera where all you can see on-screen is a floating club.
Its bizarre blend of steampunk and mini-golf adds up to an experience that is almost as appealing as it is peculiar.
Vertiginous Golf comes into its own with course design. Every hole is hosted on its own little cloud, creating a surreal atmosphere that is both whimsical and slightly disturbing (a mood that is emphasized by a morose piano soundtrack that reminded me of something the Phantom of the Opera would noodle around with in his lair). Nearly two dozen courses of varying length and difficulty are featured, and all are loaded with eccentric features that make them play out like puzzles. It's reminiscent of the classic Mouse Trap board game, lavishly accentuated with tips of the (top) hat to the Gilded Age. Holes boast multiple levels, ramps, sliding platforms, moving rollers and carpets, lavish Oriental rugs in place of plastic grass, luxurious metal railings and fences, Victrola horns sprouting up like metallic flowers, steam tubes that fire balls up and down, fans that blow balls to and fro, special holes that take a stroke off your score, and much more. It's all compellingly trippy, and it makes every hole as much about solving puzzles as it is about mini-golf heroics.
Accoutrements unavailable in terrestrial mini-golf help with these out-there challenges. You can switch from the traditional putter to a chipper when you aren't on the green in many circuits. This lets you shoot longer distances and get the ball off the ground. Holes can be scouted from a distance with a remote-control robot hummingbird. A little jet on the ball called a bug (which actually looks more like an electrified Faberge egg than anything produced by Nike or Top Flite) can be activated on a limited basis to move toward the cup (a big help on the often curvy greens) or put the brakes on if your shot is going long. A rewind bar powers the ability to pull back bad shots--at least for a limited time, as it drains fairly quickly as you deploy the feature. And multiplayer mode can become a zany free-for-all, with players using various weapons to attack rivals. Bombs knock balls right off the course, slime sticks balls in place, and mini whirlwinds send shots all over the place. It's just a shame that the multiplayer servers are so vacant right now.
A robot hummingbird serves as a remote camera offering up fly-bys of holes.
Gameplay remains true to real mini-golf while still embracing the bizarre series of puzzles that are crammed into every hole. I was constantly forced to plan out my approaches in advance, and choose to either play it safe and try something conventional like a bank shot or go crazy and attempt something such as chipping the ball over a bank of fans onto a rolling platform so that I could catch the green without careening off the edge of the course and plummeting thousands of feet to the ground below. But even though the structure of the holes elevates the stakes of the game well past the windmills of terrestrial mini-golf, the heart of the game is still about making the shots when needed.
Ultimately, the challenge is two-fold. Not only do you need to putt for dough, you also always need to be thinking two or three shots ahead. As a result, the game can be impressively difficult, especially when playing the tougher Median and Dark Hole courses (these can be as difficult to follow as an MC Escher print), as opposed to the pick-up-and-play mini-putt ones. I found that I had to learn these harder holes with a few run-throughs (even with the hummingbird contraption, which wasn't nearly as useful as experiencing the holes first-hand) before I even had a chance at finishing close to par.
Every hole is hosted on its own little cloud, creating a surreal atmosphere that is both whimsical and slightly disturbing.
All this trial and error can be frustrating, and I initially felt like I was being cheated. But the sheer necessity of learning holes also pumped up the replay value, as I kept going back for more. Such intense early difficulty pushed me to better my scores. I particularly enjoyed the speed rounds and the driving range for their many challenges, which made them feel as much like logic puzzles as mini-golf. Discovering smart routes to pins and then actually pulling them off was incredibly satisfying.
A few problems are caused by the visuals and the controls. The camera can be very awkward to maneuver, mainly when you're close to the cup, as these areas are often enclosed. Shooting with the ball up against a grilled glass wall can be nearly impossible simply because you can't get a good look at the hole. Controls are a little lacking in finesse, no matter if you use the mouse, keyboard, or gamepad. Instead of the expected light touch, the club pulls back in a somewhat jerky fashion. As a result, it is all too easy to fire a rocket when you want a gentle tap. In-game physics are very rigorous at the cup, too. Any ball moving a touch too fast will skip past the hole, and balls only rarely grab the lip and roll in as they will in real golf.
I'm not sure how big the audience for dystopian steampunk mini-putt in the sky is. But if you've got a hankering to see what fictional high-tech Victorians would do with this staple of modern amusement parks, you can find out with the oddly captivating Vertiginous Golf. Its puzzling, challenging, and deeply weird characteristics make for a unique and engaging experience that brings new life to the staidest of sports.
You'd think that being alone and adrift in outer space, with neither a ship nor a way to communicate with civilization, would be a slow affair (and almost certainly lead to a depressing death). You might expect to gradually float through the void, pondering your life choices as you starve to death. According to Lost Orbit, however, you can make it home in one piece as long as you hurtle past asteroids, orbit some planets, avoid some lasers, and make a robot friend along the way.
You are Harrison, a maintenance worker sent out alone to repair a comm relay far from civilization. While making the repairs, your ship blows up, leaving you with nothing but a spacesuit that evidently has an infinite supply of thruster fuel. At first glance, Lost Orbit resembles an old-school arcade shoot-em-up. You can only move left and right at the bottom of the screen as the action automatically scrolls forward. The biggest difference, though, is that there is no shooting here, only dodging. You want a high score at the end of a level? Then you're going to have to dodge stuff while moving really fast.
Space into dreams.
The breakneck speeds you can reach in Lost Orbit evoke some of the same excitement you might get from a fast, arcade-style racing game. Boosting and zig-zagging your way through clumps of asteroids and other obstacles isn't too different from weaving through traffic in a game like Burnout, and it brings with it the same risk: If you collide with a hard surface, the result is going to be messy. Moving rapidly through tight, dangerous spaces is exhilarating, but a slight twitch in the wrong direction could mean instant death.
It's not just chunks of rock you have to worry about. As you make your way home, you encounter old machinery, lasers, aliens, and more potentially deadly perils. Then there are the objects that aren't necessarily deadly but still affect your flight path, like wormholes that teleport you across the screen, pulsars that push you away, gas giants that give you a boost of speed, planets you can orbit around, and more. Oh, and did you think you'd only be dodging everything? You also must collect bright purple pieces of "obtainium," which contribute to your score and allow you to buy permanent upgrades.
Way to orbit.
So there's a lot going on, but thankfully, moving around feels natural, though it may not be what you expect at first. Your character is flying through space in an Iron Man-like fashion. When you tilt the analog stick left or right, you actually tilt his body left or right in the same way you might bank an airplane (albeit a very agile one). Tilt hard enough, and you actually begin to loop around, allowing you to do a quick 180 if you know you don't have room to dodge an obstacle. It doesn't take long to get a handle on how to move exactly the way you want, giving you great precision even at high speeds.
One clever method for getting out of harm's way is to wrap around the screen. If you venture off the right side of the screen, you re-appear on the left and vice versa. If wrapping doesn't provide a large enough safety net, you can spend the obtanium you collect on a few new abilities, including a faster boost (one that's more limited in its usage, making it more like nitrous in a racing game); a barrel roll you can use to move left and right more quickly; and the ability to slow down, which is a vital skill to have while zooming through space. You can also buy the game's lone offensive ability: a bomb that blows up certain obstacles in your immediate vicinity.
When everything comes together and your reflexes are sharp, the speed and precision of Lost Orbit's 2D gameplay would make Sonic the Hedgehog jealous. Boosting through a cluster of asteroids, narrowly dodging turret fire, orbiting around one planet to refill your boost meter then dashing through another to get an extra burst of speed...there's a lot of timing to get down, but when you nail it, everything feels fluid. The sense of accomplishment you get when you make it through a level while barely slowing down is addicting.
Spend obtanium to obtain abilities!
It also looks great in motion, making good use of subtle but effective character animations combined with flashy colors and visual effects. Even dying has its own special touch. There are plenty of death animations (usually of the over-the-top comedic violence variety) to marvel at, provided you don't hit the reset button as quickly as possible every time you make a mistake.
The story has a striking element of charm to it. Harrison's adventure is narrated by a similarly lonesome robot with some humorously tragic (and sometimes touching) things to say. The downside is that while this commentary is interesting the first time through, it's not as appealing when you replay levels multiple times either to improve on your last performance or simply because you keep dying. Hearing the same lines of dialogue repeated over and over grows tiresome quickly, and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn the narration off.
When everything comes together and your reflexes are sharp, the speed and precision of Lost Orbit's 2D gameplay would make Sonic the Hedgehog jealous.
Levels in Lost Orbit are short and usually beatable in a couple of minutes at most. Checkpoints scattered throughout them make completing the game a short, relatively easy task. The game's roughly 40 stages can be completed within two or three hours if you're not worried about how you're ranked at the end of each one. If you do want to be rewarded with a platinum medal for each level (or a high spot on the time trial leaderboards), though, you'll want to get through each one as quickly as possible without dying while collecting every piece of obtanium along the way. This is a fun challenge, though there's a bit of frustration involved every time you want to try a stage again. While there's a button dedicated to restarting a stage quickly, the reset isn't instant, forcing you to wait a few seconds every time you want to go back to the beginning of a stage. That might not sound too bad, but if you keep messing up halfway through a level, it's frustrating to not be able to go back instantly. Games with similar time-based leaderboards, like Super Meat Boy, have spoiled us with their instant restart abilities.
Due in part to its brevity, Lost Orbit isn't the most memorable of adventures. You barrel through its levels quickly, and unless you want to try for faster time trial scores, there's not a lot to come back for. Still, the rush of speed and the simple charms of the animation and narration make this game a blast while it lasts.
The Battle of Verdun began in February 1916, and lasted ten months. It was the lengthiest battle during World War I, claiming around 700,000 dead, wounded, or missing soldiers. The multiplayer first-person shooter Verdun revisits this tragic time, bringing to life the fear and thrill, as well as the boredom, of trench warfare. Verdun takes a risk; it is a rare shooter set in a time period more frequently visited by strategy games. It gets close to capturing the essence of battle, despite being stymied by the realities of the often slow pace of the Great War, and all the while stumbling on its own obstacles.
Most of your time in Verdun is spent in its Frontlines mode. Here, two teams take turns crossing no man's land in an attempt to take their opponents' trench. It's a game of momentum. When you're on the offensive, the game allows you to charge onto the battlefield as your opponents line up in defense. Taking an enemy trench requires that you survive long enough to reach and occupy it, driving out combatants. Like in Battlefield, the more allies you have, the faster the trench is taken, and the faster you gain a point. But taking the trench won't be easy. Enemies have the advantage when you're on offense, and if your team is kept away until the end of a timer, momentum transfers to the opposing team, and soon it's their turn to charge, putting you on defense. The more you capture, the deeper the battle moves in the map toward enemy headquarters--the final goal of Frontlines. Battles switch constantly from offense to defense throughout the match, and winning outright doesn't come easy. Of all the games I played, nearly half ended in a draw. There is also a rifles-only team Deathmatch mode to consider, but the population of competing players is considerably lower than Frontlines'.
Keeping you in the World War I tug-of-war fantasy, the game introduces a "dead zone" that surrounds each of the enormous maps, and keeps you out of the field between trench lines during defense. If your team fails to capture an enemy trench, you're given a countdown timer and forced to retreat to your own line; otherwise, you are executed. You're not allowed to put even one toe past these lines, even if they lie mere inches in front of your own trench. Stepping over causes the colors to fade, and a countdown emerges, pulling you from the experience with the subtlety of a cracking whip. It can get frustrating to deal with, as you're sometimes unable to gain a better viewing angle without your own soldier barking a line about deserters getting shot the moment you move too far. It's especially irritating when you pass over the line while moving through dug-out trenches or clearly defined pathways on the battlefield.
Frontlines mode focuses on squad-based combat. Loading into a match, you get placed into a squad and fill a specific role. Some squads focus on recon, while others are attack squads that include positions for riflemen and grenadiers. Depending on the squad type, the squad leader--a non-commissioned officer, or NCO--can call in special commands such as artillery support, airplane recon, or gas assaults. Playing in a squad is highly encouraged--not only is it just short of impossible to take out a trench on your own, but it makes the game a lot more engaging. I struggled during the first several hours, grumbling every time I got killed off in some ditch or another, but Verdun opened up once I learned how to work with my squad. Communicating when and where to attack made the charging offense not only more realistic, but also made it feel like a managed, well-oiled machine. Over time, your squad levels up, unlocking bonuses such as new uniforms and status buffs. Collecting experience points happens naturally as you play, but you gain a lot more by playing with a squad. It's a much faster way to earn levels and career points, the latter of which allows you to open up new weapon tiers for your chosen class. Over time, you gain access to new and more powerful rifles, pistols, and mounted machine guns.
The gas mask obscures your vision, but it's better than choking to death.
There is one reality of the Great War that Verdun can't escape: tedium. There are moments of boredom while desperately waiting for something to get you out of the trench. It can be a pervasive burden that may cause you, as it did me, to sprint from one end of the trench to the other in the hope that action eventually presents itself. The feeling is magnified by the respawn times, which can force you to cool your heels for twenty seconds at a time or longer--and respawning doesn't always play into your favor. There were many instances where I returned to the battlefield with a relieved sigh, only for a vigilant sniper to send me immediately back to the death screen with another twenty-plus-second wait. When most games run from fifteen to thirty minutes, expect a lot of dead air between the chaos of charges and sweeping out enemy trenches.
A lack of variety is another hindrance. Many of the maps are expectedly ugly, pockmarked with craters and devoid of much vegetation. Some fronts, however, are lusher than others, introducing trees to stack up against, along with swaying grass and bushes that add a welcome palette of color. But for the most part, the differing shades of brown with the intermittent splash of green is not a blessing to the eyes. And yes, of course I realize the battlefields of World War I were never attractive, but the aesthetic gets tiring. Beyond the art, Frontlines mode itself rarely deviates from its design, which begins to drag after many hours.
Leveling up your squad unlocks bonuses.
However, Verdun does deliver rare moments of inspiration when bursts of excitement and terror shatter the monotony. A bullet fired from an unseen enemy rips through the air, striking a fellow soldier just to your side. In your peripheral vision you see him collapse limply into the mud. You drop down and your mind races. Will you move locations and pop back up to scan the horizon for the killer? Are you meant to avenge your lost comrade, or join him? Back inside the trench, there is often barely enough room for two soldiers to pass by, sometimes resulting in both getting momentarily stuck as they attempt to move to another section in need of defense, all while bullets fly inches overhead, and more bodies drop. It can be scary and terribly claustrophobic at times. When enemy commanders drop choking clouds of poisonous gas upon the trench, you're forced to put on a mask that obscures most of your vision, which is already hampered by the billowing yellow cloud. Coupled with the cracks of nearby rifles you're no longer certain are friendly, that feeling of claustrophobia rapidly crumbles away to panic.
Suddenly you hear the command to charge and overrun enemy fortifications, and you leap over the edge and into the heart of no man's land. You traverse the war-torn earth by hiding behind hills, trees, or in bombed-out craters. You watch as enemies scramble over hills in a desperate attempt to reach the security of their own trench--most getting cut down before earning that safety. Crouching or lying prone helps you avoid getting taken out by enemy combatants, as you wait for a CPO to call in mortars or gas to soften the hardened enemy defense. You methodically move from one point to the next, taking time to line up your rifle and pick off enemy soldiers who carelessly expose their heads. Without question, the pace is slow and deliberate; Verdun is the antithesis of many modern shooters, yet more exciting than many of its peers for brief periods.
Not only craters, but trees can also provide good cover.
But even when the game is at its finest, you must still grapple with some problems. There is frequent lag, causing enemy soldiers to abandon their running animations to teleport across the field. Worse, however, are the times when your gun appears to fire through an enemy without doing any damage. This scenario happens all too often: You line up your shot, fire, and… nothing happens. You line up again, more carefully this time, fire… nothing. I have lost fights at point-blank range due to this "phantom bullet" occurrence. It seems impossible to finish more than two games without it happening, and when you drop into a twenty-second respawn after being killed by someone you know you couldn't have missed, it becomes infuriating. There are also issues with the matchmaking. Team balancing is constantly at odds, and the game provides no quick solutions other than to ask if a person or two would "please" switch sides. Steep holes and trenches can stop you in your tracks, and for some reason, barbed wire can kill you, holding you in place and then killing you if you don't move.
The battle is won by claiming enemy trenches.
Verdun is powered by the Unity engine, and, despite some pop-in with details at a distance, it sports some decent visuals. However, those looks are paired with low performance. Fiddling with the graphics options helps, but it never completely solves the issue. Motion blur can be turned off and anti-aliasing lowered, but your machine may still struggle to reach a smooth sixty frames. And it must be said: Losing color from your vision every time you take damage is a feature of too many shooters these days. For a game like Verdun that strives for a certain authenticity, this is a distracting element that it could have done without.
Developers M2H and Blackmill Games deserve kudos for introducing a shooter in this typically untouched wartime era. I admit that, complaints aside, I found Verdun growing on me. I became immersed in its careful pacing and focus on squad movement. But though I put about twenty hours into the game, I don't ache to return to its trenches. Verdun somewhat succeeds in its lavish goal, but its road to glory is lengthy still. Until then, it sits on the edge of the line, waiting for the rallying cry.
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