Valiant Hearts: The Great War Reviews
The title is certainly not without its faults with fairly simple gameplay and puzzle-solving, and a sometimes over-reliance on historical facts and pop-up text to describe its WWI-inspired world. Yet, like the greatest feats and tales of the first World War, this tale, though difficult to witness at times, is nonetheless an important and great one for the ages.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War on Switch adds nothing new, but it is - like four years ago - the same wonderful game.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Valiant Hearts: The Great War isn't about being the hero, though there is some of that. It's not about beating the "bad guys," as you'll experience the war from both sides. Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a beautiful depiction of the horrific effects of war.
There has been a large contingency of people asking for a war game in which you don't pick up and fire a gun, so it's great that, when it actually happened, we were given a game with this much charm and emotion packed into it.
Ubisoft Montpellier made a decision to not make the player feel powerful, to instead make them afraid of the war.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a graphically superb puzzler, tackling historical events that are not perhaps known to everyone and doing it in a lighthearted, yet respectful manner. Gameplay wise it's not going to challenge but the story, the characters and the emotional response that the combined product will evoke in players is easily enough to justify the asking price.
While the UbiArt Framework logo at the beginning of the game should be a clear sign that Valiant Hearts is visually beautiful, its breathtaking, unforgettable narrative comes somewhat as a surprise. While its occasionally dull gameplay and noticeably low level of challenge prevent it from being a masterpiece, Valiant Hearts is one of best games a Ubisoft studio has created in recent history.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War will certainly not be the most challenging game you play this year, but it is utterly absorbing, charming and a real experience for fans of puzzle and adventure games. Worth investing in for the soundtrack alone, it's an experimental title that - whilst it feels as if it could be a valuable educational tool for a younger audience - is still a mesmerising game for adventure fans of any age.
Valiant Hearts is a breakthrough title that attempts to show the gamer the impact the First World War had on regular people. Instead of being given a bag of guns, you're simply tasked with surviving by getting through each area so you can get the protagonists home. This is the game that proves war games don't have to be all about mowing down waves of enemies and the emphasis on the characters and atmosphere outshines the basic puzzling and item gathering.
Valiant Hearts is an adventure more interested in exploring the effects of war, than having you re-enact the violence.
Valiant Hearts is a good game offering an emotionally satisfying experience. With about six hours of gameplay (depending on puzzling speed) it has solid value. As humans, we should all play this, even though it's not the best gaming has to offer.
A refreshing slant at the handling of a tough subject, Valiant hearts is touching and poignant WWI game.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War presents us the grim side of World War 1 which is now thankfully a thing of the past. It looks pleasant and this Nintendo Switch port seems to have fared better than Child of Light despite running on the same game engine, so if you are seeking a brief interactive story, this gets a solid recommendation.
An emotional, rewarding take on the Great War in a medium that often glosses over the horrors of battle. Beautiful, sad, triumphant.
Valiant Hearts is a nice game. Nice being a word equally complimentary but damning in its pedestrianism. It's a game worth experiencing; a visual and audial treat; a heart-warming and heart-breaking yarn. But as a game… it falls ever so slightly short of its target.
While Valiant Hearts struggles to make sense of itself as a game, in its odd, playful innocence and in its focus on four friends (and a dog) it at least offers a fleeting human perspective on a new kind of war that turned out to be far, far worse in its mechanised violence than anybody was quite expecting.
A heavy-handed but impressively sincere attempt to tackle a subject most other games would never dare, with the end resulting being both affecting and entertaining.
The subject material is ghastly, but Valiant Hearts has the right mix of emotion and entertainment to make enduring the Great War worthwhile.
While the puzzles and story aren't especially rewarding, the overall tone is still interesting and successful
Valiant Hearts works from a novel concept, and is loaded with brilliant ideas—hell, it's great just to see a war from the perspective of a country other than America—but Ubisoft's lack of self-control ultimately makes it less impactful than it should have been. It's still a worthwhile experience, though it could have been so much better if Valiant Hearts left us wanting more.