World War One: La Grande Guerre 1914-1918

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts

The manual's out - so this is it: 1.05f

I've seldom seen a computer game this bogged down in boardgame-yness that's tried to hide it so badly, nor rules so verbose which manage to say so little.  And I've seen a lot of (sometimes good) boardgame conversions, and a lot of bad (sometimes really bad) rules. I suppose the boardgame-like nature if the game is even more galling because we're not talking about a wargame from the 70s here - this is a port of the kind of game that tends to get called a Euro Game. And not in a good way.

People who like Euro Games generally mean nice components & family oriented themes when they say Euro Game.  People who don't like them nearly so much (ie people like me) generally mean: lots of pointless but flashy parts, lots of badly written rules, lots & lots of simple mechanisms that are all very samey where one slightly more complicated mechanic would do, & generally lots of light without much heat.

The manual

I was mostly waiting on the appearance of a manual to review this game, because until now -- yes, a few months after the game came out -- it was never really clear just what was meant to be happening.

The manual looks nice, right up until you try & read it.  A lot of the rules are written in the format:  here's some info, but there are exceptions, but I'm not saying what they are or how you can tell if an exception applies. Or the rules will tell you something can happen, but won't tell you how, eg: "This semi-transparent window lists all game messages as well as players chat. It can be extended for better readability."  Ah but how ...

Pick any topic, it'll be covered non definitively in at least three places, and you'll be left knowing it's probably important, but not how it works or how to do it.

My favourite rule so far is: "If a fortress is not present (following its destruction), the fortress is no longer operational ..." Really. The rules for sieges last for four pages and could reasonably be explained with one small chart.

The game

The manual is coupled with a game engine that often won't let you do something, move an army or play a card (ahem, I mean an event), while it won't tell you why.  I'd like to trust the game and assume the reason I couldn't do something made sense, but when I'm told that France's morale has gone down because a town in France has just been captured by the US, well, I begin to doubt.

"This stack is currently not in movement. If the 'firepower' warfare doctrine is in vigour it benefits of the combat factor bonus ..."

I don't think any native English speaker would ever talk about something being "in vigour", and I'm pretty sure all this talk of a malus went out with the plague, but the tooltips are worse than that.

As far as I can tell the tooltips, where there are any and they make sense, are more or less static, and as the rules change by phase (again with the phases) and year, and are sometimes hardwired in the worst possible way, it's still largely up to players to guess what's going on.

An example of a particularly silly hardwired event being that when 1914 ends, trenches magically appear. Doesn't matter if there's a point to them appearing in January 1915, the game just changes no matter what your armies are up to. Haven't made contact?  Dig trenches.  Winning?  Dig trenches. Bored?  You get the picture.

The manual's duplicate-things-without-explaining-them-anywhere design approach extends well into the game: the same feature (eg rail movement) will have a different symbol on a unit & on the button you have to press to get it to happen - for no obvious reason that I can see than perhaps to hide some very, very simple mechanics behind some more obfuscation.  (Hey presto, the appearance of depth, while really all we've got here is clutter.)

Toggle buttons look pretty much identical to my eye when they're pressed & when they're not too, so it's often pot luck about whether you're turning a particular feature like rail movement on or off.

Duplication's everywhere. Click on an event dialogue and you get the same dialogue again with the choice presented in a slightly different way.  Click on the choice & you'll get the same dialogue again telling you you just made the choice.  Huh? You can spend some of the wasted time puzzling over why the enemy AI insists on playing bad events on itself. Revolution?  Sure, sounds like fun ... oh oh ...

Everywhere the interface is annoying, and looks like it was never tested at all. You get your reinforcements in a dialogue box, but everywhere time you drag a unit out the box, bam, the box disappears. Time to open it again. Again. Twenty times a turn.

Movement's also by drag & drop.  Most things are. It used to be hard to line up units with the areas on the map you wanted them to land on - now it's slightly easier but it's still pretty hard to get units to land on the combat placemat (more on that later), and the pathfinding's gone all to hell too. Move a unit two areas forwards in East Prussia & it'll trace a path three back, two sideways & eventually (usually) where you wanted it to go.  Click go to run your turn and watch your units dance from side to side in France.  Not a good look in a WEGO game where who gets to an area first is important.

The areas by the way, and this was pointed out by someone more observant than me, are mostly hexes.  They're irregular and trying hard to look like random shapes, but they're good old hexes. Seems to me that the map could be a lot smaller, the right way up & a lot less graphically burdensome (or just a lot less burdensome, I hate the map) if they were drawn as smaller regular hexes rather than big irregular blobs. It's that Euro thing again, Euro games don't have hexes you see.

Land combat continues to be the same strange, representative of nothing system where you place your chits on a cardboard mat & they square off at each other one at a time.  Except the cardboard placemat's on screen.  Dumb.

The naval system still doesn't work either.  Start a cruiser action in the South Atlantic & the whole British battle line will show up as reinforcements (and I think it's meant to work that way), & as a bonus air combat never seems to happen now at all.  But at least after wading through the manual I can now see that whenever air combat's fixed it's only ever likely to achieve the same nonsensical state as naval & land combat.

The game used to be so unstable I couldn't see whether the underlying design was bad, but it's stable enough now:  It's bad. I gave up playing when I got told my enemy's parliament's mood was: "."'.  That's all: ".". Perfectly representative of my mood at that point too.

I'm leaving the score at two lemons. WWI is an unstable realisation of a bad design.  Any patches & rewrites at this point are pretty much going to be irrelevant to me: this game sums up the horror & futility of WWI games. They seem cursed.

(Older reviews of the game as it existed in the scandalously unfinished state it was initially sold in follow).

Version 1.04

I got my first chance to play with the patched game tonight and I got as far as the November-December 1914 turn before the game crashed again.  Combat results are still written over the top of each other, journal entries are still written behind the unit display ... It's much, much more stable than it was, but the 'technical issues' are not all resolved by a long shot.

The interface is very clunky when it does work, but I can get used to it.  The sideways map of Europe is downright horrible, especially compounded as it is by national borders appearing in the wrong place or not appearing at all.  (Where does Belgium start & Holland begin?  Why does part of the Austrian army set up inside Italy?) But I can get used to the map too. What I can't get used to are the endless nonsensical results.

Units still seem to walk through each other, though whether they're retreating from combat forwards, or passing by each other it's hard to tell.  Combat happens off map & unless you're more of a whiz at obscure Central European town names than I am it's often hard to know which battle is happening where.  Maybe I'm just doing something wrong with interceptions, I haven't seen any coherent explanation of how that's meant to work. I just don't know what's going on most of the time.

For the most part I can't really tell if things are working as designed and the design is bad, or if things aren't working, or if it's me & I'm meant to be clicking on something; all because the manual is truly a bad joke and hasn't been touched in this patch. Writing a manual is on the list of things to do apparently. Hm, it might have been an idea to do that before you sold me the game, no? 

Without the 'how it works' thread on the Ageod forum I'd have no idea what was going on at all. As it is I'm still probably only running at about 50/50. Sieges seem to be totally random. Supply doesn't seem to do anything. I went several turns before I worked out how to open the production screen at all, but it didn't seem to matter.  The Allied AI seems to be sticking to some sort of scripted plan where it just mills about behind Verdun without defending it or the approaches to Paris, and it hasn't reacted to the German Pacific fleet sitting on New Zealand for four months ... a proper review will follow, but it'll need to wait till there's a proper game for me to review.

This game is promising, and has an epic scale to it, but it's no more than promising, and so far I've got no real inclination to raise the score I've given it.

Version 1.03

There's quite possibly a game -- maybe even a good game --hidden in here somewhere, but after two days I've given up trying to find out where.

The confusing and hopelessly threadbare manual fails to provide more than vague hints at what's meant to be happening, and the unstable and often simply unreadable interface is the worst kind of rushed-to-market mess. It crashes. Often. Freezes up; writes all over the screen, sometimes in other languages and often in meaningless jumbles of semi-English sentences printed over the top of one another ...

This game may yet get patched to a playable state, but right now it's not even close to merchantable quality. Don't buy it, you'll be sorry if you do.