The Great War: Western Front™

I like the mechanics, I like the battle concepts, but I don't understand why you wouldn't make the campaign multiplayer...The biggest gripe is AI, and just being able to play the campaign against someone would totally fix that.

Abandonedware stay away, needed updates and more content.

Do you like doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result? Do you like attritional warfare? Do you like timing artillery? The game is for you Game can get old quick unless you enjoy the above.

Games pretty broken and buggy, the devs have abandoned it and moved on. AVOID

一年没更新，制作组跑路了，xdm慎入

WWI was static and repetitive. But that wasn't because after a successful assault everyone shook hands and returned BACK TO STARTING POSITIONS unless it happened 2-4 times in a row! That's NOT how you simulate static warfare devs!

I wish there was a "Don't Buy at Full Price" recommendation. Because the game isn't a complete write off. The first couple of turns and first dozen battles or so were kind of fun. But you quickly learn that those have all the gameplay you're going to get. What really kills the game is its pathetically passive AI. I have now finished two campaigns where the enemy strategic AI has refused to attack me. It lets you eat it alive. It'll barely reinforce where you build up, if it does at all. I've even seen it pull corps away from a sector under sustained attack to build a 7-9 corps doomstack somewhere else to do nothing with while I devoured the deprived sectors around it. The battle AI is little better. It will waste supplies on reinforcing after battle start, sporadic artillery barrages on your artillery park while they're on cool down for negligible damage, and constant fire missions on one infantry company the computer decided to really hate. When it isn't wasting supplies it just sits there passively while you slowly pick it apart like a reversed tower defense game. The battle AI opens every battle (when it has more than one corps in play) by sending three infantry companies head-first into your lines. After that show of force, the battle AI is content to sit in it's trenches to be bombed and assaulted. I've only seen it counter attack when it has more than six corps available, and it does so by just sending a stream of companies after one trench with maybe one barrage in support. It will do this until it exhausts it's manpower and you have an even easier go at dismantling what's left of its defenses. There are a sad amount of maps actually available, and they try to stretch that by having you play on flipped versions occasionally. The maps appear to get assigned to sectors randomly too, leading to instances where you'll fight on the same map in different places on the same turn. Even better, the AI trench placement seems to be hard coded into the map, so the same maps will always have just about the same trench setup, leading to the same optimal attack pattern for the player. The battle map persistence that the game touts as a feature has been around since at least Dawn of War: Dark Crusade (2006!) and its only real purpose is to save you some set up time laying down trenches, since you still have to re-place everything else. The gameplay loop, as you can imagine, is incredibly repetitive. It is sort of expected given the setting, but the problem is that it doesn't really evolve once you get the timing down between a heavy artillery barrage and assaulting a trench. All the tech web does is add little spins and modifiers to that assault loop without fundamentally changing it. Your guys get a little bit tougher and faster, air recon helps you save supplies by revealing which trenches are occupied, air harassment and bombers help soften the ones that are, trenches provide a little more damage resistance as you upgrade them, tanks give morale buffs/debuffs and can soak up some damage while you send another human wave in, but ultimately every battle has you do the same fire and maneuver tactics to the same variations of trenches. The game is salvageable. They could add more map variation, a few more to spice up the dozen or so they have. They could patch it so the specialist infantry aren't ridiculously niche to use. They could fix the horrendous unit collision, to where companies aren't pushing each other around like bumper cars in no man's land. They could make artillery more historically accurate to field and use instead of the suppression/damage casters they are now. They could make the intel side of the tech web worth investing in. They could make it so you can't as easily farm supplies, gold, and will. They could make it so the campaign actually ends when you get the other team's national will to zero/negatives, instead of a seemingly random future turn. The list of possible tweaks and fixes goes on and on. And the saddest part is that the mod community never took off, so there's almost no community fixes. As of writing, there's only about one and a half pages of workshop mods. As it is, the game feels like a small team's first project or a stable alpha to be used as a proof of concept. Another few months in development may have done wonders. But this is what we got. If you have a serious WWI itch, get it on a deep discount. Otherwise it's not worth your time.

It had the potential. Its abandoned now.