Verdun Review - A clunky experience.

 By Sam Coles:

While everyone is focusing on Battlefield 1 there is a title that may have gone unnoticed and that game is called Verdun. Verdun has some good ideas but ultimately falls short due to the controls and questionable mechanics. However it’s nice to see other developers to tread in the waters of World War I.

Verdun is a squad based multiplayer shooters set in the trenches of the First World War where you can play only a handful of modes in different fronts of the conflict. First impressions were good with the atmosphere and sound design, guns sound like they can do some damage with piercing shots from sniper rifles to the crunchy sound of machine guns as they pierce flesh with the screams of your enemies. After a few hours of playing this game the issues start to emerge and after a while it became more frustrating than fun to play and I stopped playing.

Before I get into the negatives about this game let’s go over what content you get to take part in. First you have your standard Team Deathmatch which you know what you’re in for if you’ve played any FPS in the past 20 years, Free for All I shouldn’t have to explain, Frontlines and Squad Defence.

Frontlines is full out trench warfare where you spawn at either end of the battlefield and push forward to towards the enemy team, the way to gain the advantage of this mode is to stay in the trenches because if you peer your head up above the trenches you’re dead. Squad Defence is yet another horde mode. I don’t know about you but I’m getting bored of horde modes because fighting waves upon waves of enemies is not my idea of fun it gets boring fast because most of the time you don’t need to change your strategy and it becomes monotonous.  

You have several classes of weapons to unlock from you standard rifles and pistol to the more heavy offer like the machine gun, which unlike Battlefield you can’t wield it standing up you have to mount a placement to use it. Verdun is slower than Battlefield because it aims to be more realistic for better or worse so guns tend to do realistic damage for the most part if the hit detection doesn’t play up which does now and again.

 Now there are a few issues with this game that made me stop playing, the first reason I stopped was the fact I had great difficulty finding game that wasn’t team deathmatch, there aren’t many people playing this game. Another issue I had was the controls and the delay; there is a delay from when I pressed a button and the action happening on screen which can result in hundreds of frustrating deaths because the game takes a minute to realise what button I pressed.

I had issues with graphics not in terms of them being bad (which they are) but with visibility, there is one map set at night which usually I wouldn’t have a problem but I couldn’t see anything unless I was out of the trenches which resulted with me getting my head blown off. The final issue is that there are few sound problems with them syncing with animations for example when I reloaded my weapon I heard all the usual noise such as removing the magazine and putting in a new one but when I cocked the bolt absolute silence. I know some people wouldn’t take any notice of that but I have a keen ear for sound effects and it breaks my immersion.

Overall Verdun wasn’t an enjoyable experience for me due the clunky controls and the blurry and muddy graphics.