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amazon Valiant Hearts The Great War reviews
Is there a war that doesn’t cause suffering, is there any sacrifice that leaves no regrets? ”
20 million people died, 16 million injured, $ 85 billion in war costs and more than 16 countries entered the war, those figures from World War I – one of the two devastating wars most of humanity. In just four years, the conflict between the Alliance and the Treaty had a great impact on the lives of millions of people, turned villages and cities into a wasteland, and sparked the development of fascism. The harm World War I inflicted on all mankind showed that there was no such thing as victory or glory in war, but pain and loss.
“War makes people crazy …”
… yet, human love still resurfaced strongly and drastically. It connects souls with the same aspiration to be reunited with relatives, guiding them to return to their homes. Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a story about love, friendship, and human attachment, and shows that no matter how fierce the war, human love will never end.
The brutal war is recreated through a new perspective
Valiant Hearts: The Great War follows the four main characters over four years when World War I is in progress. Karl, a German farmer who lives with his wife and children in the French countryside, is exiled and forced to join the German army. Emile, Karl’s father-in-law, joined the French army in hopes of finding his son-in-law. He met Freddie – an American soldier who volunteered to engage in the war and Anna – the young Belgian student who became a nurse on the battlefield.
Amid the chaos in the rain of bullets, players can still feel that they are just ordinary people who wish to escape the death lurking before their eyes. For Emile, with each step, he watched a soldier fall, which motivated him to keep going, just missing a beat and he would be like corpses piled up in the swamp.
For Freddie, it was the burning thought of revenge and friendship that kept him going. For Karl, he desired to reunite with his wife and children. For Anna, it was human love and the notion that everyone deserves to live, whether it is our side or the enemy.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War does not highlight the “greatness” of war as it is in its title, but on the contrary, cruelty, and mourning is something the player will encounter throughout the game.
It was a land filled with massive bullet holes, only a brown color of mud and dead bodies piled up, it was a gray sky, ash, black smoke after the evil bombs had been dropped, there is the city of Ypres filled with the green of chemical weapons …
With simple animation, a unique narrative, and cleverly integrated historical facts, Valiant Hearts: The Great War tells a compelling, emotional, and immersive story. However, Valiant Hearts: The Great War is more than just pain and loss. Every time Anna saves a human life is also a game that shows that human greatness and kindness are the most precious thing. Or when Emile cuddles the companion dog, Karl chases the wolves to save a girl, the letters of the main characters leave … all seemingly small things like above have “lit up” the gray picture spray throughout the game and exalt human greatness.
Awesome sound
What surprised me about Valiant Hearts: The Great War was not the war figures or historical details recorded through each event, but the horror of war perfectly portrayed in cartoon style.
With simple animation, a unique narrative, and cleverly integrated historical facts, Valiant Hearts: The Great War tells a compelling, emotional, and immersive story. However, Valiant Hearts: The Great War is more than just pain and loss. Every time Anna saves a human life is also a game that shows that human greatness and kindness are the most precious thing. Or when Emile cuddles the companion dog, Karl chases the wolves to save a girl, the letters of the main characters leave … all seemingly small things like above have “lit up” the gray picture spray throughout the game and exalt human greatness.
Awesome sound
What surprised me about Valiant Hearts: The Great War was not the war figures or historical details recorded through each event, but the horror of war perfectly portrayed in cartoon style…
The gameplay of Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a combination of landscape and puzzle genre. Honestly, the gameplay of Valiant Hearts: The Great War is not bad, diverse puzzles are cleverly integrated, however, overall gameplay does not have the depth of the classic puzzle adventure genre.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War doesn’t require players to combine objects, puzzles only take place in two or three maximum zones, and it won’t take long for players to find their way forward.
Not only that, but the writer also encountered some disruptive puzzles … the excitement while playing. For example, in chapter 2, when Emile and Freddie, and the platoon confronted the deadly gas. While rushing straight up and shouting “heroically”, the game forced the player to spend 3 minutes jumping down a tunnel and breaking the gas machine, jumping up and … running again, no one must be excited at that time again!
The last issue that should be mentioned is the unfriendly method of controlling the character on the PC. Writers pissed off when having to hold the Alt button to be able to command the dog. In some cases, when a character needs to hold the lever or the steering wheel to one side, holding down the Alt button can make holding and pressing another button uncomfortable.
Additionally, the four buttons 1,2,3,4 are used to tell the dog that the dog cannot be assigned to another button (oddly enough that all the remaining buttons can be changed).
Some problems in the plot
About three-quarters of the time, Valiant Hearts: The Great War depicts the main characters as people who have been harmed in war and trying to escape it. However, the story of Freddie in chapter 4 … crushes this concept completely.
Freddie no longer feels alone at the beginning of the game and he begins to become a true “One Man Army”, which makes Freddie’s story appear cliché and fuzzy. Maybe Ubisoft Montpellier found running and hiding in the first 3 chapters too boring so they decided to throw a tank in for Freddie to destroy everything on the way for “happy”?
Besides, the writer is also quite disappointed to realize that the character Anna has not been properly invested. As a nurse, 80% of the time as Anna, players will have to play a small minigame every time they heal the injured.
There would be nothing worth mentioning if this mini-game was a brain challenge, over here it was a series of… QTE is continuously and extremely simple. Not only that, Valiant Hearts: The Great War introduces Anna quite impressively, but in the end, the story of this character is extremely superficial. Anna is a medical student, her father is a doctor, and… over. What remains in the player’s mindset? Two words: disappointed!
