On The Western Front

I look for troop concentrations. I shell them for 5 days straight. I raid them. I take prisoners. The funny green number goes up. It is 1916. I have launched about 400000 shells at the British. I have taken 0 real ground. Incredible. Just like the real thing.

I have 39 hrs into this, and have gone 5 days in the British 1915 campaign. Much has happened at the micro level but very little at the macro scale. Basically I'm still getting artillery gunpits dug, and infantry dugouts for my frontline company HQs. Learning logistics, managing officers, artillery missions, and aerial recon are interesting for a day or two but of course tech development is very slow (how much change would one expect in front line technology in 5 days?) so it's realistic as far as all that goes. But much like the real conflict, it all becomes very tedious and casualties creep upwards from constant shelling and MG fire with little to show for it on the ground. Somehow my companies began or became intermixed and the UI can be quite clunky for trying to get companies and battalions sorted out while staying under cover in the trenches. Sure, you can select a company HQ and send all subunits (platoons) to a central location, but the unintended consequences can be units wandering into MG fire or attracting an enemy barrage and before you know it, 100 casualties just from trying to reunite a dispersed company. So you have to micro-manage wayfinding for each platoon, which gets really tedious. Probably the dev has a smart way to do this but I haven't figured it out. So lots of logistical detail that is not well-modeled in most other games (ex: casualty recovery, and detailed supply) but the complicated UI and low graphic quality (sorry!!) makes it confusing and hard to understand what is going on. Weird things ensue -- my artillery batallion HQ appears in no man's land trying to assault an enemy battery with pistol fire (!!?) and is wiped out. How did that happen? Be careful clicking on units and giving orders, that was supposed to be a batallion level barrage, not the OK Corral. One really weird thing I haven't seen anyone mention (and not in the help files or tutorial), while picking up my laptop with the game paused I fat-fingered the keyboard and up popped a screen I had never seen called the Debug Console. Tons of fun stuff in here, including the ability to freely (really?) add new technology (helmets, grenades, extra engineer company, artillery upgrades) bypassing the expensive and slow valor point system. Also the ability to modify officer qualities (remove a "hated" attribute and add a "expert engineer" for free? ) Not clear how this affects valor points, etc or what this is really doing to gameplay. I later found a hotkey shortcut called "console" which I apparently accidentally hit that brought this screen up. Would love to know more about this feature. Anyhow, many kudos to an indie dev who has worked on this project for years and is obviously super knowledgeable about WW1 trench warfare and who takes constructive critcism REALLY WELL (look at his patient responses to some early reviews). For $10, it's an interesting peek at new design concepts, game development, and the logistics of managing a WW1 division. I hope he keeps chipping away at this "work in progress" as the game has great promise and is a neglected topic. I've played WDS WW1 Campaigns, WDS WW1 Squad Battles, AGEODs Great War, and a cute little "pixel soldiers" Android app that did a surprisingly good job of depicting divisional scale trench combat with Atari style graphics. So I've seen a number of takes on WW1 gaming. This one is unique but still a bit of a diamond in the rough. Thanks for the opportunity to comment!

I love the idea behind the game however the UI, usability and graphics REALLY drag this game down. Improve those and you have the perfect WW1 game. The developer is really good though and works hard on improving the game, so i recommend buying the game to support a cool idea and the devs work on improving the game.

Deep detail and very steep learning curve, but once you get it down, its a fun complex game. UI isn't the greatest but once you look past that, the game is great. You master it and eventually you can become the next Field Marshall Haig and move your drinks cabinet one yard closer to Berlin every offensive.

Been playing on and off for years. The Dev is always updating. Must be WW1 enthusiast

It needs more work. Otherwise looks promising.

I truly think that concept and game dynamic wise this is the best available strategic first world war game. It feels realistic, it is unforgiving and it has a lot of depth and complexity to it. As you're playing a single division you only oversee a limited part of the front, which is generated and different with every new game start. I like that you are able to either control everything by yourself or let officers do the parts you don't want to, depending on their skill they might do mistakes though. Also the developer found quit a genuis mechanic to make you care none about the lifes of your soldiers, as their deaths pay into experience points for tech development. So you will want to send them for basically meaningless trench raids to pressure the other side a bit. Great! I did encounter some bugs, particularly with orders and units just doing random stuff I don't want them to do. However the developer is constantly busy with the game and is very responsive to bug reports, so I am positive the game will overcome these eventually.

Quirky niche titles, my favourite. When they work, that is. And this one doesn't. For no obvious reason all the sounds in the game are completely broken for me; the music and all SFX have this grainy interference noise to them as if my headphones' cable has interference, yet nothing else on my PC is affected at all. It's blatant and painful on the ears, and I think I'm being reasonable in saying I don't want to play a mute game just because it's broken. Vsync wouldn't fix it, there were no sound quality settings, so who knows, all I know is that 100% of all audio sources were broken and unbearable. I even found the music folder and could hear all the music files just fine, so it's an engine-level problem. Every time I click a button, the game becomes a 0/10 experience. To get to the minimum time to review a game I decided to at least hop in to see the gameplay. I'm not going to critique it from lack of understanding, I'm aware I've not done the tutorials. My main critique here is...why the square maps? I look at it and don't feel like I'm on any particular front, it's just a generic square map in the middle of a "WW1-ish" place. I can tolerate hearts of iron 2 and 3, I can tolerate Supreme Ruler, even Strategic Command. At least I felt like I was fighting in the theatre of war it claims I'm in on those games. I have to refund simply over the fact the entire audio system is unusable, coupled with the fact it was constantly blackscreening me like it was trying to change to sub-native resolutions when I fullscreen'd it. I would have liked to try and give this game a chance, because niche games like this do always have an awkward learning phase, but the technical challenges immediately force me to not even go that far with it. I'll put my specs here in-case someone thinks I've thrown a 2006 budget PC at the thing: Windows 11, i7-12700k, 64GB DDR4, RTX 5090 Game is on an M.2 SSD

Having learned deep games that look like arse such as Dwarf Fortress I can absolutely see the appeal.

i forgot to review this so to all my friends who see this you may buy this trench simulator its pretty good even if its pretty ugly <3 and the dev does seem to try his best to make stuff and fix stuff woo woo