Verdun Reviews
With noble intentions but scrappy delivery, Verdun is a bit of a mess.
Verdun brings multiplayer shooting to World War I in all its glory, as well as the frequent boredom.
A brave attempt at creating a more thoughtful shooter hindered by poor execution and messy technique.
Despite that problem, and the overall roughness of Verdun, I still find myself enjoying it. I can’t stand to play it for more than an hour or two per night due to the default match length currently being thirty-minutes. Sometimes it can be a very boring or frustrating game — one where I die much more often than not and barely get to engage with the enemy. Other times I can pull off a long distance shot to take down an enemy or make it through the enemy trench unscathed. Those moments are great, but it doesn’t make the lack of a large player count or the lack of teaching its mechanics any easier to deal with. Verdun is at its core a good game, but one that is hard to recommend beyond a niche audience who enjoy punishing and somewhat accurate World War I shooters.
Verdun’s goal is an admirable one, to capture the feel of warfare on the Western Front, on occasions it manages to do that and be fun. The rest of the time, it’s an unintuitive slog. It might be a better game on PC, but on PlayStation 4, it’s almost certainly not going to be this year’s most fun or engaging WWI shooter.
Its goals are noble enough, but this low tech shooter takes its realism too seriously – as the drudgery and unfairness of trench warfare is made all too real.
I wasn’t able to find many full matches in Verdun, but when I did I actually had a pretty good time. It’s too bad that most of my play time was spent in matches with three or four people, not 32. Nobody is playing this game because it’s a technical mess, and I can’t recommend it to anyone due to that. If you want to play Verdun, then pick it up on PC. Sadly, the PlayStation 4 version is an inferior version that launched dead on arrival.
It’s realistic, historically accurate and sometimes satisfying gameplay can’t make up for the fact that the game’s community is almost non-existent, gameplay is riddled with technical issues and the lack of a proper tutorial can make the game downright frustrating.
Much like The Great War itself, Verdun is rough, grim and wholly unforgiving. A perpetual lesson in patience and poise which decisively punishes fools but rewards frugal armchair tacticians, Verdun makes the player work in every way that a good shooter should. Emboldened by an impassioned take on one of history’s more overlooked conflicts, Verdun’s rough appearance is not enough to detract from one of the finest shooters on PS4.
Rampant server issues, poor performance, badly designed UI and a non-existent player base have crippled what should have been a really interesting change of pace for console shooters. Verdun may improve with time, but as it stands, is an absolute mess.
If Verdun had adopted a free-to-play model on consoles, I could see the beauty in its unrefined animations or crudely rendered environments. But with a superior PC version on the market, it’s best to forget this PS4 port even exists.
Verdun is a very limited multiplayer shooter that has a great amount of technical issues. The result, instead of being something satisfying and hard to master, is a frustrating game whose graphics and animations take you out of the experience. However, 32 players mode is something that you should try.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
When Verdun works, the mixture of tension and uniqueness it provides is unlike anything else and utterly engaging. Too often, however, the game gets in its own way, either due to technical issues or poor design decisions. It’s an incredibly interesting and unique game, but its tedium and technical issues should be considered before you enter its trenches.
Much like the conflict that the game shares its namesake with, Verdun is a ferocious and tense multiplayer shooter the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time. Generously stuffed with player-made emergent moments on the battlefield and an incredible sense of place, Verdun is not just a great take on one of history’s more marginalised wars, it also happens to be a resoundingly solid shooter in its own right too.
As a history buff, I've read a lot of books and watched a lot of films about World War I, but there's something different about experiencing that sort of event from the first-person perspective. Verdun isn't necessarily going to enthrall every shooter player (though I personally love the crack of its bolt-action arsenal), nor does it fully capture the horrors of World War I. I'm not sure any game could, at least with our current technology.
Verdun leaves you feeling as if you have truly been in the muddy trenches of WWI. But the gameplay will definitely not make you feel like a soldier.
In conclusion then, with the graphical glitches that are in place, I can’t with a good conscience recommend Verdun. If things were fixed, the pacing and style of gameplay would suit the more tactical, considered player and I can see that the Horde Mode could be fun with a few like minded friends.
If you're itching to play Verdun, then the PC version is the only way to go. A healthy online community and good performance mean that there's always a game going on with people who know what they're supposed to be doing. On the Xbox One, that's not the case. Problematic presentation aside, there aren't enough people around to keep the games interesting, and the weapons unlock system doesn't seem to function correctly all the time. It may be the more realistic title when compared to Battlefield 1, but none of that matters when other factors make this a title that you should avoid unless you're willing to put in the time to learn the ins and outs of the system, provided the community sticks around.
For all it’s worth, Verdun is a fantastically developed game with a firm grounding in history, from developers who clearly love their subject material. It’s also quite a tough game to recommend.
While the PC version of Verdun is a good experience in general, the console port is so bad that no matter how much I try, I cannot recommend it. It's full of bugs, laggy and boring. Do not play it.
Review in Persian | Read full review