Today we have a WW1 set FPS, but with added zombies and demons.

Bruce Willis

I had heard mostly bad things about this game prior to playing it, so I wasn’t expecting much when I loaded this game up, but after a patch to get it to run in 1920*1080, I was pleasantly surprised. You play an American - no idea why - fighting in the British Army during the battle of the Somme; your regiment is ambushed by Germans and you’re all gassed and shot down, with only you and one other survive - this leads to a cutscene which actually looked really good in parts, if a bit compressed. You see a fellow soldier become impaled by a barb-wire monster and then black out, waking up in a makeshift bunker, along with the other surviving soldier, and this is where you find out that every single Englishman is a Victorian era cockney. Words lead to fists and you end up learning the meleé system in the game, which works an awful lot like Bulletstorm, without the whip, but with the ‘combo’ system, which rewards you for getting headshots, and meleé combos, and using all your weapons etc - dumping into an enemy causes you to hold your handguns sideways and you get a reward thing called Bruce Willis. AND this came out before Bulletstorm was even an idea - those damned Americans stealing Russia’s ideas as usual. (People Can Fly are Polish, but that joke is less funny)

The weapons are kinda weird; the game has a completely redundant ADS function, where your guns are just as accurate whilst aiming down them as without, which kind of makes sense, with this being a bit of a retro shooter in a modern shooter’s body. The weapons are of course period - with maybe some weird ones later on - and you can dual wield with your handgun: so you can have dual Lugers, one Luger and one M1911, an M1911 and a spade, or even an M1911 with some dynamite. It’s a pretty good way of handling this stuff, as a lot of your enemies are slow moving zombies, so a meleé weapon is good for conversing ammo. Your character has recharging health, but only to a certain level, any higher and you have to collect medpacks, much like in Just Cause 2.

The game is pretty violent, with heads and limbs exploding here and there, leading to the game having to be cut in Germany and Australia. The enemies are kind of bullet sponges, a lot of them taking at least 2 headshots to kill, or one if you kick them to the ground first. There are also a lot of bosses, which is cool; there were two within a short space of one another right at the beginning of the game.

Overall I was kind of pleased with the game, even with the awful VA, it had a nice aesthetic to it, and it wasn’t some dumb easy FPS like we see often now. Thanks Farm 51 - who are also Polish, and two of whom worked for People Can Fly, weird.