The Great War: Western Front™

It's like the Total War series finally giving WW1 a try. I noticed a slew of reviews mentioning that the game is repetitive and kinda boring... well... yeah, that's kinda the point. It's WW1 trench warfare on the Western Front. It will be a grind; don't get attached to your troops because you will suffer hideous casualties. Eventually you develop poison gas (hooray war crimes!) and rickety old tanks and silly-looking biplanes, and they help a bit... but ultimately, you're fighting one of the most horrendous yet pointless slaughters in human history. Machine guns and barbed wire and artillery barrages are going to ruin your day. The game plays out a lot like the Total War series. You have a gameboard-like map with your armies, you maneuver them around and attack enemy armies. It starts in either 1914 (shortly after the Marne and Race to the Sea) or in 1916 as the stalemate is starting to get tedious, and those tanks and poison gasses are about to become a thing. When you attack (or get attacked...) you get a setup phase to lay out your trench networks and machine gun nests (the teaser video shows some of this). Then the fight begins and you get to watch your boys get shot to pieces by enemy machine guns and artillery. The trench works persist, so as you keep fighting over the same small stretch of land, it will be increasingly covered in trenches and bomb blasts. You "win" by capturing an enemy capital zone (Paris for the Allies, Kreuznach for Germany); this is practically impossible due to the nature of the war but there is an alternative! Each side starts with a "National Will", a number representing their desire to keep fighting. Winning and losing battles causes this number to go up or down, as does inflicting/suffering unusually heavy casualties, capturing enemy territory, and random world events based loosely on actual events (like the sinking of the Lusitania). When any side drops to zero National Will, they surrender and the war ends. It's not a perfect game though. There are glitches and crashes to desktop, although they're generally infrequent for me. There also isn't a lot of variance in the maps - there's maybe 5-6 of them, so you'll see the same maps over and over. The maps also don't really change for the particular place you're fighting - Paris uses the same map as the fields outside Compiegne. The AI isn't great either - you'll have weird instances of the AI throwing wave after wave at the same spot in your line without bothering to try to find alternative paths. Likewise, pathfinding can be weird, like troops ordered to run into a trench will run towards it only to stop and run backwards and swirl around like a school of fish - giving the enemy more time to shoot at them. If you're looking for the dynamic battles of WW2 or ancient history, this game is definitely not going to scratch that itch. Maybe eventually these guys will cover the Eastern Front or Middle Eastern Front of WW1, and those would be more like that, but this game isn't that. This is the meat grinder of northern France.

A worthy strategy game for World War I enthusiasts. The only issue is that simulating World War I can be a bit... repetitive, for lack of a better word. In the early game especially, your tactics are the same almost every battle: line up a dozen or so squads in your trenches, bombard the hell out of the enemy trenches, then send your men over the top and watch as 40% of them get cut down before reaching the enemy and another 20% get cut down fighting them. Repeat two or three more times to capture a single tile on the map, IF you didn't lose too many men. It gets better in the late game when you unlock different tactics and armor to make breakthroughs easier. But it'll be quite a few hours in your campaign before you get to that point. Still, I find the game fulfills its purpose well.

I want to like this game so much. The trench warfare is great, building your lines, working out strats, the idea of unique units from each country. So much great things, but the gameplay is a solid loop that can bore some people but others can and will enjoy it. But the AI is trash, it just rushes over and over, while it can be fun playing a tower defence game for a while, when you want to go on the attack its awful, Your units will stand around and refuse to get into the trenches and die right away, I understand attacking in a ww1 game should be miserable, but this is a step too far lmao. Units get stuck on each other, enemy artillary always knows where to strike, Your planes get lost in seconds and just leave enemy bombers to have all the fun in the world. The way you "win" Is to never attack, Just spam end turn and wait till they rush you and do that for a good few hours. This is not a "the great war" This is a "build your trenches and wait simulator" Which can be fun at times, but when you look for the bigger picture, their is nothing else. Just end turn and the same battlefield again and again.

The game mechanics in of it self are pretty interesting. The campaign is decently well done, and provides some overview of playing. However, there are some big downsides to the game as well. Downsides - Game gets extremely repetitive, The game cycles though the same 7-8 of the same maps with very little varriation other than where tree placement is. - The Custom made scenarios need more player testing. Some scenarios just break if you do the objectives before it prompts you. The biggest problem is when I ran ahead of the objectives to the point in the triangle map I had cornered the AI into the corner, and I moved up my troops at a backline point that I was "to hold" and it instant failed me after moving them out. - No active multiplayer, the lobby and server system sucks. - You do the exact same strategy with very little varriants. If your not playing meta, your ham stringing yourself. - The AI is dumb, they spawn in troops from a point that you got 20 troops outside of just to laser them down. - Higher difficulty = AI cheats more resources, not actually a good ai. - Ai doesn't know how to attack very well, there has only been a single time where I had a minor lose and that is because it was 1 division vs 12. By all accounts, the AI should have just been able to bombardment to death and win, but didin't. Upsides - Fun campaign map - Core gameplay is fun - A good game for 40-50 hours beyond that it gets stale. Overall, if its on sale for like 10$ its worth the buy, but beyond that it isn't worth it.

Such a wasted game. Could have been so much more. The biggest problem is that it even today in August 2025 it is full of bugs and totally unoptimised. The game is clearly abandoned.

Abandoned Game! Buy on Sale.

So much potential wasted The general idea of the combat in general could work but whta the Hell is that acardy execution and oh boy bugs and crashes oh and also abonened since a over a year

Extremely promising abandonware. Devs gave up completely after 1 major update. I had high expectations from Empire at War, and was really let down.