Ageod's World War One Review
Review - posted by Trash on Thu 10 June 2010, 16:42:44
World War One
When Jason gave me the chance to review Ageod's World War One I was thrilled. One of the most bloody conflicts ever, senseless charges into machinegunfire and barbed wire, poison gas and a sharpened shovel to the head. Really, what is there not to like? Well, quite a bit as it sadly turns out.
All is quiet on the western front.
The game has a small collection of campaigns and scenarios on offer with the meat of the game being provided with the two grand campaigns. There is not really anything in the way of a tutorial and none of the scenarios are small enough to qualify as one so you are pretty much thrown in the deep right away. That is not something any grognard worth his salt is unfamiliar or even worried about but then WW1 goes out of its way to make things even more difficult for you.
The first thing you'll notice is that the map is tilted sideways so that instead of the usual north you'll find east on the top of your map. While some may not find this too troublesome it was disorienting and incredibly irritating to me. Why they decided to reinvent the wheel in this is beyond me as it has no additional valua and makes the map a lot less intiutive. The second thing you'll notice is that the map looks and feels quite liveless and bland. Ageod is known for their intricate and detailed maps but this one reminds me more of something out of the earlier paradox games. Graphics are otherwise clear but unremarkable with a rather uninspired art direction that often makes it look decidedly amateurish. The music is the standard clasical orchestral fare with sound effects being limited to battles and the like. The music quickly grated at my nerves with the sound effects being so quiet and occasional that they barely registered with me.
Diplomacy is a powerful weapon
Thankfully you'll then encounter the more interesting points of Ageod's WW1. Not only is the game build around an interesting historical period, it has some equally interesting and quite deep mechanics behind it as well. As soon as you've chosen which campaign to play you'll get to choose which of the mayor powers you will represent. Then you get the chance to choose which war plan you want to follow. These choices are mostly based on history and will give you different initial targets, perks and strategies. You'll then get to pick different bonuses and events for your country. I really like the war plans in that they can radically change a current scenario and add quite some replayability to the game.
The game plays out through roughly month long turns which comprise out of several phases in which you can undertake diplomatic actions, conduct naval warfare, move troops around, enact policies and set budgets. It's all quite intricate and while results are almost never immediate it can be immensely rewarding to see several turns of diplomatic action come to fruition or wage a u-boat blockade which is really starving out the enemy. Research (and many other actions) are based on chance with budgets being used to determine your chance of it happening. It can make a huge difference when you get for instance dedicated assault infantry early in the game but the fact that you can't direct anything makes it feel like plain old luck determines all.
More great sliders. Yay.
What the game does excell in is just how detailed it can get and how many different factors play into it. Zepelin bombardments? In. Small scale warfare in the distant colonies? In. Ideological unrest at home? In. Historic characters like Lenin and Mata Hari being used as events? In. Huge big ass train canons that take forever to drag around but blast the shit out of enemy fortifications? In. Daring flyboys looking cocky in their spiffy tri-planes? Haven't seen it yet but I'm almost certain it could be there.
No matter how well you'll play you will virtually never be able to blitz through the enemy as the game is designed in such a way that eventually your forces will grind to a hold and will dig in after which the frontlines will turn into static lines and a war of attrition starts. The same gradual detoriation happens with your home situation. As the game progresses the population will grow increasingly unhappy with the whole war situation and this will lead to revolts and strikes. This in turn brings your entire war effort to a crushing stop. This is inevitable and although events and your actions can hold it, slow it and sometimes even temporarily referse it the game will at some point end because either your or the enemies population had enough. The game usually end when one of the sides surrenders because war weariness forces them to. The slowly detoriating situation can feel quite restrictive at times but at the same time it does provide a challenge.
Planning an offensive. Not as exciting as it sounds.
Speaking about challenges, often it feels like you're fighting more with the design decisions and interface than with the enemy. Ageod games are known for being deep and detailed affairs and this one is no exception. Weather, supplies, policies, the economic situation and a myriad of other factors play an important role in the game. Unfortunayely everything is hidden behind layer after layer of unintuitive and confusing interface. Readying one single army alone takes at least a half dozen mouse clicks and two screens of information to wade through. Add to that a manual which often contradicts itself and seems to make a habit out of giving wrong information and WW1 often feels like a chore instead of being fun. What doesn't really help either is that the AI is atrocious. Even with the fog of war turned off for it the AI often fails to plug gigantic holes in their front lines or adequately prepare their forces for either offense or defense. In one game I managed to encircle an entire army (something which the game mechanics make almost impossible) because it left an entire corridor free and in another I marched straight to Paris when the AI somehow managed to neglect an entire portion of the front. I don't expect a human level intelligence but some resistance would be nice.
In the end the game drowns its cool premisis and drags it interesting features into the murky depths by being incredibly unintuitive, unpolished and by having an AI that could be outsmarted by my socks. The end product is only marginally more fun than having trenchfoot. Avoid.
Ageod has recently released a "Gold" version of this game which apparantly makes the AI better and replaces the map with a more usual North-South one. The buyers of the original game can update for an additional fee of 15 euro.
