Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Genre: Puzzle-Platformer

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: UbiSoft

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in the compilation Child of Light Ultimate Edition + Valiant Hearts: The Great War along with Child of Light Ultimate Edition.)

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a Puzzle-Platformer that chronicles the experiences of a small family and their friends as the world descends into World War I. This plays out with your characters using their unique skills to get past challenges, with your party changing and the circumstances evolving as the story progresses.

World War I is an era that has only recently started to get explored by videogames, with World War II tending to get more of the focus, what with its clear enemies and more modernized weaponry. As such, it may have been wise for this game to eschew the typical First-Person Shooter route that most war games take. While there is plenty of fighting and killing in this game, the combat isn’t really a focus of the gameplay, it’s more of the backdrop to the story and the puzzles.

While tackling a topic as heavy as war with a cartoonish presentation could easily go wrong, this game uses its stylized look to great effect, helping us to really empathize with the characters. Even though none of them speaks a word of English that isn’t muffled, we still get a great feel for these characters’ personalities, and the focus on characters amidst the backdrop of war really helps to bring the player into the experience. This is helped by documentary material players can find throughout the game that explains in more detail some of the history behind what we’re seeing – this is clearly a fictional story, but it’s also clearly based on very real historical evidence.

The gameplay itself is mostly pretty standard puzzle-platform fare, with players pushing boxes, using characters’ unique abilities, and directing a helpful dog to assist. It’s nothing spectacular or new for the genre, but it works well enough and changes with a fair frequency to keep things interesting.

Valiant Hearts doesn’t really break any new ground in the gameplay department, but it does give us a good story set during an era that’s not as thoroughly explored by videogames as it perhaps should be, and it pairs that with gameplay that has enough variety to keep things interesting. Fans of puzzle-platformers might find this worthwhile, but the real appeal of this game is its story. If it sounds like it might interest you, you should definitely give it a try.

tl;dr – Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a Puzzle-Platformer with a heavy focus on its story, which uses the personal experience of one group of friends to explore the greater conflict during World War I. The puzzle-platforming here is decent, but nothing special. Rather, the real draw here is the story, which brings us into The Great War with likeable characters caught up in the action. If that story sounds appealing to you, this game is well worth trying.

Grade: B

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}