![]() That isn’t very much: placing a single span of advanced, concrete-reinforced entrenchments on the tactical map might cost 50 supply. The free supply source is your units themselves: each infantry corps, for instance, brings about 180 supply into each tactical battle. The clever thing The Great War has done is it has created two sources of supply, one “free” and one very, very expensive. Supply is really the heart of The Great War, a catch-all resource that stands in for the huge demands that trench warfare imposed on the combatants, from stocks of artillery shells to the additional military infrastructure required to maintain large numbers of soldiers in striking distance of the front. Like its Flash predecessor Warfare 1917, it is trying to do all this while remaining easy to learn and fairly undemanding to play. With a turn-based, hex-map strategic layer that serves up simple RTS-style tactical battles in the fashion of a Total War, it attempts to capture both the mythologized spectacle of the trenches and the often overlooked dynamism that was, ironically, such a key component of the long stalemate. Into this relative void comes Petroglyph Games’ The Great War: Western Front. You might need to go back to Armor Games’ 2008 Flash game Warfare 1917 (which was just salvaged via emulation a month ago) to find a video game depicting both the pitched back-and-forth nature of the trenches and the development of new tactics and technologies to break the stalemate. Slitherine’s Commander: The Great War is a pretty great game about the war as a whole, but as such the Western Front is only a small part of it, one of many battlefields demanding the overstretched resources of a global war effort. World War 1, or something like it, is a culminating event in grand strategy games set around the late 1800s and early 1900s, but it is not their subject. Shooters like Battlefield 1 and BlackMill games’ trilogy of Verdun, Tannenberg, and Isonzo (those latter two are not Western front games but they are definitely “trench” games) found a less ironic compatibility between the grinding stalemates of the war’s great battles and the looping, respawn-driven action of a multiplayer shooter.īut what of wargames and strategy games? Here your choices might be even thinner. After that, from a more explicitly ironic direction, comes the turret-shooter tower defense game Toy Soldiers, which combined vividly beautiful depictions of the trenches with the conceit of the armies and all their horrible weapons as toys in a child’s playset. ![]() It’s no accident that Valiant Hearts has probably been the most successful World War 1 game of the past two decades, as it operates comfortably in the same impressionistic mode that a lot of literature and film about the war does. While trench warfare easily lends itself to the kind of grim metaphor and spectacle that made it irresistible to artists, particularly of an antiwar or dissenting bent, it has proved an elusive and perhaps unappealing subject in video games. When 2018’s Solo tried to capture the senseless horror of Imperial military service that young Han Solo wanted to escape, it went straight to a disorienting and doomed “over the top” attack that owed more to Paths of Glorythan to the battle of Hoth. Its imagery is summoned by Games Workshop almost every time its wants to depict the way that 40K’s Imperium wages war. The imagery and metaphors or World War 1 have been adapted to countless other settings, a shorthand for war at its most industrialized extreme and brutally irrational. If that position seems overheated from the vantage of almost 50 years later, I suspect it still has more truth to it than we might expect. Fussell wrote: “.there seems to be one dominating form of modern understanding that it is essentially ironic, and that it originates largely in the application of mind and memory to the events of the Great War.” Writing back in 1975 he argued that the trenches had not just defined the the war’s legacy, but had also reshaped how subsequent generations of English-speakers engaged with the world. Via poetry especially, the war looms large in any survey of English literature, which forms the subject of literary historian Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. American schoolchildren used to be taught “ In Flanders Fields” in elementary school by middle school there would be a unit on All Quiet on the Western Front. Even if you know next to nothing about the war, you probably get the same set of images that I do when I hear phrases like “no man’s land” or “The Somme.” Muddy trenches, barren moonscapes of shell-scarred earth, men being cut down in rows by machine gun fire, or choking on poison gas. The trenches of the Western Front in the First World War are among the most indelible and enduring scenes in the historical imagination.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |