Over The Top: WWI Review – Mud, Artillery and Absolute Chaos.

There are already quite a few games willing to send us back into the mud and trenches of the First World War, so another one needs to do something a bit different if it’s going to stand out.

Over The Top: WWI definitely does that.

Rather than trying to be the most brutally serious military simulator ever made, it gives you a huge battlefield, infantry, tanks, aircraft, artillery, destructible terrain and a frankly irresponsible amount of explosives, then lets everything unfold from there.

It’s rough in places, occasionally ridiculous and sometimes completely chaotic.

However, I also had a lot of fun with it.

The Battlefield Is the Best Part:

The thing that stands out most for me isn’t actually the shooting. It’s what happens to the battlefield around it.

Over The Top has deformable terrain, which means explosions create craters and players can dig trenches into the ground. Buildings and fortifications can also be destroyed, so the battlefield you start on isn’t necessarily the battlefield you’re still fighting across later.

That makes a surprisingly big difference.

A patch of open ground can gradually become covered with craters and trenches that provide new bits of cover. Positions that originally look fairly secure can disappear under artillery fire.

It gives battles a much less predictable feel than simply learning where every wall, window and piece of cover is located.

More importantly, it fits the setting.

When artillery starts landing and the landscape gradually turns into a chewed-up collection of holes, rubble and trenches, Over The Top looks and feels at its best.

It Isn’t Trying to Be Deadly Serious:

Despite the WWI setting, this isn’t one of those games where you’re expected to study a 48-page PDF before working out how to reload your rifle.

There is tactical depth here. Classes have different roles, positioning matters and charging straight across open ground while somebody has a machine gun pointed in your general direction generally ends about as well as you’d imagine.

But the game also knows when to be stupid.

There are conventional rifles, machine guns, flamethrowers, artillery and poison gas.

There is also a baguette you can use as a weapon.

That probably tells you quite a lot about the tone.

I actually like that side of it. There are already plenty of military games taking themselves incredibly seriously. Over The Top seems much more interested in creating a WWI sandbox where serious-looking battles can suddenly descend into complete nonsense.

It gives the game personality.

There’s Quite a Lot Going On:

The class system means you aren’t stuck doing exactly the same thing every time you spawn.

There are different battlefield roles and specialist equipment, while engineers can build and officers have access to their own abilities.

Then you’ve got vehicles on top of that.

Tanks and aircraft add another layer to the fighting, and some of the larger vehicles are designed to work with multiple crew members rather than making one player responsible for everything.

When you first start playing, there is a fair bit to take in.

You’ve got infantry fighting, artillery coming in, vehicles wandering about and bits of the battlefield being blown apart while you’re still trying to work out exactly what you want to be doing.

Once you stop trying to understand absolutely everything at once, you enjoy it considerably more.

Sometimes I just want to grab a rifle, join the infantry and head towards wherever the loudest explosions are coming from.

Admittedly, that strategy also gets me killed quite a lot.

The Shooting Is Fine, but It Isn’t the Main Attraction:

This is probably where Over The Top’s smaller development scale is most obvious.

The gunplay works and the weapons have enough impact to make combat satisfying, but movement and animation don’t have the same level of polish you’d expect from one of the enormous AAA shooters.

There are moments where it feels slightly awkward.

For me, though, that isn’t really enough to spoil it because I don’t think the individual gunfight is what makes the game interesting.

It’s everything happening around that gunfight.

You’ve got artillery hammering positions, players digging into the terrain, vehicles moving around the battlefield and potentially dozens of soldiers fighting over the same area.

The actual shooting is one part of a much bigger sandbox.

If you’re coming into Over The Top expecting something with the movement and weapon handling of Call of Duty, you’re probably going to notice the difference immediately.

If you’re coming for the scale and battlefield chaos, it makes considerably more sense.

First-Person Is a Welcome Addition:

Over The Top originally has a strong third-person focus, but a first-person perspective has since been added.

In my humble opinion, that suits this sort of shooter much better.

Having the choice between the two perspectives is definitely preferable to forcing everyone into one style, particularly when a lot of PC shooter players are naturally going to feel more comfortable in first person.

The August update also adds the United States Expeditionary Forces to the game.

I haven’t played that content, so I’m not going to pretend I can tell you what difference the Americans make to the game.

I wasn’t provided with a key that gives me the opportunity to test that content, and while I can confirm the US forces are now in the game, anything I say about how they play, how their equipment feels or what impact they have on the battles would be speculation.

So I’m leaving that part alone.

It’s Definitely Rough Around the Edges:

This isn’t a massive-budget production and you can tell.

Some of the animation is a little stiff. Movement can feel awkward and there are moments when having so much happening at once makes everything look slightly untidy.

Normally that sort of thing bothers me quite a bit in a shooter.

Here, strangely, I find myself forgiving a lot of it.

Partly because the game is trying something genuinely ambitious.

There can be infantry everywhere, vehicles moving around, artillery landing and the actual ground underneath everybody being destroyed or dug up at the same time.

I’d rather have a game taking a swing at something interesting and showing a few cracks than another perfectly polished shooter doing exactly the same thing we’ve already played dozens of times.

Over The Top absolutely has cracks.

It also has ideas, and that is something here at Wildstar Gaming, that we very much encourage.

There’s Single-Player Too:

Multiplayer is obviously going to be a big attraction for a game built around large battles, but Over The Top isn’t entirely reliant on it.

There is single-player support as well, which is important for anyone who wants to mess around with the battlefield systems without relying on an active multiplayer session.

There’s also a map editor and Steam Workshop support, allowing the community to create and share their own battlefields.

For a sandbox game, that’s a really useful addition.

The destruction and terrain systems are some of the best things about Over The Top, so giving players more environments to use them in should help give the game some legs.

Verdict:

Over The Top: WWI isn’t the most polished shooter I’ve ever played.

It doesn’t need to be.

What it does have is a genuinely entertaining battlefield sandbox that is capable of producing some brilliant moments when the infantry, vehicles, artillery and destruction all start interacting with each other.

The deformable terrain is easily the highlight for me. Watching a battlefield gradually get torn apart during a fight gives Over The Top something that feels genuinely different from most shooters.

There’s also a sense that the developers aren’t afraid to let the game be a bit daft.

One moment I’m crawling through a trench while artillery lands around me.

The next somebody has brought a baguette to a gunfight.

That’s Over The Top.

There are rough edges, particularly around movement and animation, and anyone expecting the polish of a huge AAA production needs to adjust their expectations accordingly.

But I enjoy it.

If you like large-scale shooters, WWI settings or games that give players a load of systems and let chaos do the rest, there’s a lot here to enjoy.

It isn’t perfect, but I’d take interesting and slightly rough over polished and forgettable any day.

Disclosure: Wildstar Gaming was provided with a PC review code for Over The Top: WWI. The United States Expeditionary Forces content wasn’t included in the version I was able to review, so I haven’t assessed or scored that content. The provision of a review code does not influence the contents or score of this review.

WildStarGamimg Scores: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆