An anthology of five First World War stories, each with its own protagonist, setting and mechanical emphasis: a British Mark V tank crew, a gambler pilot, an Italian shock trooper, an Australian runner at Gallipoli and a desert campaign riding with Lawrence of Arabia. The prologue’s rotating-casualty device, dying and taking over the next soldier as name cards appear, earns its reputation within minutes, and the sombre framing of doomed camaraderie, narrator voice-overs and the lost-generation epilogue holds the whole anthology together with genuine weight.
The rotating verb is the structural triumph: each story genuinely changes how the game plays, from tank piloting with repair loops and bullet drop to dogfighting, plate-armoured close combat, bayonet-charged infantry assault and desert stealth with lures and silenced weapons. The tank and shock-trooper chapters are the highlights, and the hatchet stealth run through a Gallipoli camp turns the game briefly into Hitman, an absurd and delightful detour. The mud-ambush twist that ends one story as a pigeon flight is unexpected in the best way.
The air-combat story is the low point: awkward inverted controls, repeated collisions with friendly AI and no lock-on assistance make dogfighting a chore for anyone not already fluent in flight games, a franchise weakness this entry inherits rather than solves. The finale’s stealth rules break down too: armoured enemies cannot be silently killed despite being armoured only at the front, and artillery-gun sections kill instantly with no warning, both shortcuts that undermine an otherwise well-paced desert story.
Stealth generally swings between Hitman-style sandbox delight and inconsistent rules, though the bayonet charge is a genuine joy, turning infantry assault into a speed game. Weapons render with a persistent dirty-worn detail that sells the period, and the collectible field manuals and codex entries exist for completionists without demanding attention from anyone else. Repeated tutorial hints, one tip recurring three times in a single campaign, grate against the otherwise confident presentation.
Roughly five hours cover the whole campaign, with the first story running about ninety minutes and the rest settling into thirty-to-forty-minute chapters, a front-loaded structure that suits the anthology format. Characters die mid-story, the epilogue honours those who served, and the closing dedication lands with sincerity, all of it doing more emotional work in five hours than longer campaigns manage in fifteen.
Technical presentation holds up remarkably well even on base hardware, with visual spectacle in the prologue alone justifying the price of admission. The anthology means no single mechanic wears out its welcome, and the through-line of doomed camaraderie, five unrelated lives across one war, gives the package a coherence its episodic structure might otherwise lack. The horse retreat through the desert story is a high point the finale never quite matches, and message-capsule objectives give the stealth chapters concrete aims beyond simple avoidance. Field manuals reward exploration without ever requiring it, a collectible philosophy more games should adopt, and the story pacing, front-loaded as it is, never drags once the tank chapter hands over to the pilot.
Overall, a short but inventive WWI anthology whose five war stories each swap the core verb, held together by sombre framing and a genuinely striking prologue, with awkward air combat, un-stealthable finale armour and repeated tutorial hints as the honest friction. Five hours of varied, sombre, occasionally brilliant campaign work that earns its confident recommendation.
