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Tales of tremendous sacrifice enshrined in ‘Valiant Hearts: The Great War’
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War is ugly… but you wouldn’t know that from many of today’s games. Our obsession with the perfect headshot, Michael Bay explosions, and the race to accumulate the highest body count has turned military-themed gaming into a glorified blood sport.
And because of its lack of clear-cut villainy, such as the Nazis of World War II and the faceless terrorism of modern warfare, the video game industry has typically shied away from one of the greatest architects of human misery in the last century – the First World War.
Ubisoft Montpellier’s latest title is a rarity, but not only in its tackling of the seldom-visited events between 1914 and 1918. At its core, “Valiant Hearts: The Great War” is a story about family, love, and camaraderie – about how tragedy of such a colossal scale thrusts the spirit to the brink of madness and tests the tensile strength of the ties that bind us.
The outcome? One of the most sensitive, emotionally evocative depictions of war ever attempted in a medium that, sadly, often eschews more human experiences for the exaltation of slaughter. “Valiant Hearts” largely succeeds due to its heartbreaking narrative; riveting, historically inspired scenarios; gorgeous artistic direction; and its simple yet diverse side-scrolling, puzzle adventure gameplay.
Lives entwined
The game starts in the early days of the conflict. Mobilizing for war, France deports all German citizens living in the country. One of them is Karl, who is torn from his loving wife, Marie, and their newborn baby. Not long after, Marie’s father, Emile, is drafted into the French army, pitting him against the Germans, and his son-in-law.
One of “Valiant Hearts’” strongest points is how it presents more than one side of the Great War. Emile and Karl represent the French and German sides respectively, but we are also given control of Freddie, an American soldier out for revenge, and Anna, a Belgian battlefield medic searching for her abducted father. Lastly, we have the adorable and devoted dog, Walt – a fitting token for the millions of real canines that were used and killed in the war.
These five, disparate souls eventually find their lives inextricably entwined. And as the horrors escalate to plunge them into the depths of despair, so will their friendship evolve – their dependence on each other becoming their only hope of seeing the war to its bloody finale.
Dodging bullets and saving lives
Surviving a senseless war isn’t easy, especially if you’re no stone-cold killer. When not dodging bullets or getting blown up, our heroes spend the majority of the time helping others – pulling victims out of rubble, reuniting missing children with their parents, fixing the plumbing, and doing someone else’s laundry. The common denominator of all these sequences? The puzzle.
Puzzles are a blend of familiar adventure game elements, such as retrieving items for NPCs, manipulating buttons and switches, throwing objects to distract foes, and more. Though frequently clever, these challenges are never too difficult, and thus rarely impede the story’s momentum or detract from the human drama.
Many puzzles require the assistance of your dog. Walt can be ordered to squeeze into areas inaccessible to people. Woefully underestimated by enemies, he also serves as the perfect infiltrator and saboteur. In some missions, Walt finds himself serving more than one master, going back and forth between them while fetching dynamite, pushing levers, and riding pulley-driven baskets.
Each human character has a specialty, too. Emile’s duties mostly involve digging tunnels under blood-soaked battlefields or enemy fortresses – a harrowing process that usually entails burrowing around live mines. Anna, on the other hand, is all about healing the wounded. Administering medicine and performing surgery initiates a mini-game that has you pushing buttons in time with shapes scrolling quickly across a bar – a simple yet increasingly nerve-wracking activity, especially when failure could spell the death of your patient.
Anna is also the cast’s most capable driver, using a battered car to convey her friends from one war-torn town to another. In the driving mini-game, you evade gunfire, explosives, and roadblocks, which harass our protagonists to the rhythm of some of classical music’s most recognizable masterpieces.
Of course, violence is inevitable. In one case, a series of rotating pipes have to be redirected to spew suffocating steam at a machine gunner. Another has your blood pumping as you and your fellow soldiers charge the opposing army en masse. In yet another, you control a lumbering tank.
Stealth also plays an important factor in many situations. To access certain areas, enemy guards have to be walloped from behind. In one particularly memorable event, you participate in a daring nighttime escape from a POW camp, crouching behind bushes and herds of strolling sheep while eluding your pursuers’ torchlight.
Real horror
Enormous effort was poured into historical research, effectively giving “Valiant Hearts” its aura of futility and horror. Scenarios based on actual events – such as the bombardment of Reims and the utter nightmare that was the Nivelle Offensive – truly help to hit the message home.
World War I saw the use of inhumane weapons (poison gas, flamethrowers), and the advent of modern weaponry (tanks, zeppelins). All these are accounted for in “Valiant Hearts”, serving as progressively horrific threats to surmount. The butchery that was trench warfare also receives an exceptionally grim spotlight. There is nothing quite as depressing as being reduced to filthy rats scampering around dark, claustrophobic tunnels, surrounded by disease, the wounded, and death.
Notwithstanding an appropriately bleak representation of the war, “Valiant Hearts” does stumble in its portrayal of its main antagonist. Baron Von Dorf is more caricature than man, complete with maniacal laughter and mad scientist weapons. His presence does give the protagonists’ deviating plotlines a convenient reason to converge, but his character could have been handled differently.
Beauty amidst chaos
Bringing the chaos to life is the game’s outstanding art. The squat, beefy character designs and children’s picture book landscapes may be whimsical, but there is nothing cartoonish about “Valiant Hearts”. From mountains of corpses and skies choked with smoke, to soldiers celebrating in the background while their prisoners rot in dilapidated shacks, the amount of detail in all environments is staggering.
“Valiant Hearts” is equally remarkable to the ears. Melancholic piano melodies and rousing battle themes, combined with real, static-polluted music from the early 1900s tug at your emotions in all the right directions. Sound effects are crisp, filling battlegrounds with explosions and the heartbreaking cries of dying soldiers. When a child screams for help, you are driven to act as quickly as possible, as if lives were truly in peril.
As for the story and the overall progress of the war, they are presented through narrated cut scenes between missions. In-game, communication between characters is conveyed through vaguely accented gibberish, body language, and pictured speech balloons. Despite this, the game does an impressive job of fleshing our heroes out, so that their travails become ours.
A moving experience
The true villain in any armed conflict is none other than the war itself, and few games will come this close to convincing you of this. WWI broke countless families and wasted millions of lives – a truth that “Valiant Hearts” acknowledges as it pays tribute to the tremendous sacrifice of all those involved in the struggle.
As with most puzzle games, it provides little incentive for a revisit after the first playthrough – an issue which may be compounded by its overall lack of challenge. In the end, however, its delicate, human tale of love and loss offers a genuinely affecting experience. Add to that a visually unique yet authentic depiction of one of the worst episodes in human history, and “Valiant Hearts: The Great War” is well worth the purchase. — TJD, GMA News
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