Verdun Reviews
Verdun brings multiplayer shooting to World War I in all its glory, as well as the frequent boredom.
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.
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.
With noble intentions but scrappy delivery, Verdun is a bit of a mess.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A brave attempt at creating a more thoughtful shooter hindered by poor execution and messy technique.
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.
Verdun is a port of the PC game that released about a year and a half ago, and it does a nice job of bringing some strategy elements to a traditionally action-oriented genre. Verdun is not going to be for everyone, but it is an interesting take on trench warfare and provides something unique when compared to other war themed shooters.
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.
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.
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 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.
A couple of things, gentle readers. First, I’m going to redefine how I do video games reviews. You’ll notice above that, if you aren’t particularly read-y, I have a quick reference as to whether I’d buy the game at its current price. That’s my two cents, based entirely on the fact that I’m an unabashed asshat, and that I’ve probably played a ton of games that came out of the same mold. If I give you a yes, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to have fun with the game. I’m picky.
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.
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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.
Error screen, error screen and error screen, that’s almost everything that you’ll see while playing Verdun. If you manage to finally get into a game you’ll face some annoying bugs that totally destroy any kind of immersion or fun. Seriously, Verdun is a massive failure on Xbox.