Isonzo - The First World War is not a fresh one

The theme of world wars has been stirring the imagination of developers for years. While we were landing in Normandy, taking Stalingrad and storming Hitler's bunker in the tenth, the curtain was not hurried to fall on some of the real-life actors of the battle theaters. Historically, the events of World War I have rarely made it into video games. Only Battlefield 1 comes to mind, and if you caught the days of DVDs, the poor but memorable NecroVisioN. In any case, the First World War among gamers burdened with a bad reputation, it is almost impossible to find something worthwhile in this setting. The subject of today's review seeks to remedy this situation. Is it successful?

Not the first, but the First World War

Isonzo is the third major game in the WW1 series in the joint portfolio of M2H and BlackMill Games, so no discount for inexperience. Before Isonzo was Verdun, about trench warfare between the French, British, Americans, Belgians and Germans. The second WW1 game - Tannenberg - was about the war of the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarians and again against the Germans. Isonzo, however, covers a very unpopular layer of history - the battle in the valley of the river Isonzo in Italy in the time period 1915-1917.

The opposing sides are now the Kingdom of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And unlike some, let's not point fingers, Isonzo has treated historical authenticity with great respect; from geographical realism to real historical summaries on loading screens. No militant women with prosthetic limbs, but let's not point fingers...

As the game progresses, you'll be reminded of the context of what's going on more than once, and you'll get a bit serious, but none of this is that important, because Isonzo is an online tactical shooter, not a narrative war drama. Although it would be better if the game had gone for a story...

Tactical tactics with tactical mistakes again

Squads under the guidance of responsive commanders, tactical rushes to the rear and flanks, equipment planning, and no health bars, much less automatically regenerating health - mandatory attributes of any self-respecting tactical shooter.

Once we have appreciated the charm of such gameplay in Arma, then in Insurgency we understood that the formula works, and in Squad we finally confirmed this opinion, Isonzo follows the same path. Initially, the WW1 series had an ambitious goal: to create their own local "Battlefield" based on the First World War, but with more emphasis on realism. For the third game in a row we see the same picture: a pile of ideas and ambitions, but cardboard execution. After all, without proper funding to create a luxury shooter - an exorbitantly difficult task. But until we went to the server and started playing, we allegedly have not made these conclusions yet...

Isonzo greets with a well-designed menu, but suspicions about the quality of the product arise even before the game; the moment we see the player limit of 48 people...for a tactical shooter such a number is somewhat depressing. And if you remember that in Verdun and Tannenberg the maximum number of players was an order of magnitude higher - it is twice as depressing, but further on - more...

But the number of classes inspires cautious optimism. The choice of 6 classes, in theory, should make the gameplay varied, and each individual class should match the preferred style of play. For example: stormtrooper should suit those who have not yet found their place in the game, sniper gameplay should revolve around the desire to get a positional advantage, rather than the best ratio of kills to death, and the engineer is for those who love grenade launchers and hate tanks, as if they were huge ugly insects.

The situation is different in Isonzo. Initially, the classes do not differ from each other much at all. Except for the officer, who has an eight-shot revolver and a flare missile in his main weapon, whose shells illuminate the area even on the mini-map. The longer you play a certain class, the more expressive its advantages and disadvantages become: you open more perks, more weapons, more equipment. This system is not new, we saw it in Enlisted, and that's where the first significant disadvantage - the difficulty of opening new equipment and the breakdown of the game experience by class. For an hour and a half game you can not unlock anything, and having played dozens of hours on the Sniper, the same shooter will have to pump from scratch - this gamedesign 2015, over time from this system is reasonably decided to get rid of. But then there's more...

Tests to unlock new weapons... In this respect Isonzo does everything to keep you at the screen as long as possible. Tests like "Kill 50 enemies with a hand grenade", "Kill 50 enemies in the head with a rifle_name", etc., in this Isonzo echoes the dailies of conditional free shooters.

But artificially slowed progression is not something worth bemoaning with a vicious criticism. Bemoan the fact that even after opening the cherished machine gun, you can go to the server and find that...the machine gunner slot is already taken. Get ready for the fact that in addition to the main class you have to swing some unpopular, for example, the same scout - a truncated version of the officer with questionable usefulness in battle. But furthermore...

Too much indie shooter.

Isonzo has the same illness as the aforementioned Enlisted - the game has a lot of ideas, but the shooter mechanics leaves a lot to be desired. Although for an indie game Isonzo boasts good visuals and surprisingly convincing audio-play, its combat theater is too much like a scenery.

Everything in Isonzo reeks of artificiality: non-destructible objects can withstand a direct hit from artillery, land ranges can be counted on the fingers of your hands, planes fly low, but it is impossible to shoot them down, machine guns are placed only in certain, strategically disadvantageous places.

About the impact of the weapon itself is not worth a peep. The recoil of weapons is purely visual, and all weapons have the same animation. Animations are a sore point of the game in general: soldiers move as if under water, there are no transitional animations from one movement to another. If you were running in a sprint and then decide to take a prone position, it will happen in the blink of an eye. The same problem with the reloading animations - there are no basic things like swinging your body while loading a weapon or applying bandages...and there is no animation of reloading itself.

The unnatural character movements are another thing that makes it hard to believe what's going on. Throughout the entire encounter with Isonzo I want to quote Stanislavsky: "I don't believe it! Even the unprecedented audio design does not save it: the officers are tearing their throats out, shouting their orders angrily, the engines of the bombers carrying death can be heard somewhere in the background, the characteristic whistling of artillery shells presses your psyche, and the bullets are whistling above your head. At the same moment on the screen your Engineer is digging the air, and the very vocal Officer is screaming in a trench, alone with himself, like a madman... Thank you, I laughed heartily.

All the bacchanalia of the acting would have to be watched for hours. You'll be very lucky if you get the role of Officer in every game, at least you won't have to watch this Indian movie firsthand:

For officers, the game looks a little different, going a little bit into strategy. And the gameplay for Officer was the most fascinating, because playing strategy in real time, where every unit is not a brainless, obedient dummy, but quite a real person - this is what it is worth joining tactical shooters for.

I found the role-playing element of Officer the most convincing and engaging, but there was a "surprise" waiting for me in Sniper:

It's impossible to play a role under these circumstances. This may be a temporary, funny bug, but what good is it? Tactical shooters go for realism, hardcore and visceral gameplay, of all this list Isonzo has none of these points. The game wants to be realistic, with one soldier being able to take out almost a company of enemy soldiers if the player is properly straightforward; Isonzo wants to be similar to Battlefield 1, with a lot of the high-budget cinematography in Battlefield 1, which Isonzo does not have a whiff of; Isonzo wants to play on the setting by making the use of chemical weapons in World War I a full-fledged mechanic, but it is always saved from the poisonous fumes by the universal gas mask, which is elementary to put on at the touch of a button. The gas mask limits the view angle only slightly, it does not fog up, the glasses do not break, and the filters do not get clogged. So chemical weapons are not a big threat...in real life, soldiers would spit out their lungs from this stuff.

And the surface problem in Isonzo is end-to-end. It's like the game can't decide what it wants to be: an arcade shooter or a realistic simulator.

Verdict

Isonzo is not a bad game, but a purely niche game. Isonzo is for those who unconditionally fall in love with the setting, eventually get used to the game's curvature and begin to appreciate its mechanics. However, Isonzo will never be able to break into the masses, it is too unsightly. You can buy Isonzo only for the fans of the WW1 series, and the pleasure is not guaranteed: the combat scale is not the same, and the squad mechanics was considerably simplified for the new players, now you can take any outfit into battle.