Loving it so far. I didn't want to finish the game up tonight as I'll leave that for tomorrow night.
Here's my review on Steam and usually I don't go all out with these:
(N.B. 5 hours played)
A beautiful adventure game with enchanting music and characters who may move you to tears. Despite the doom & gloom outlook surrounding the game's setting, Valiant Hearts stands head and shoulders above perceived conceptions to deliver a mesmerizing moment of brilliance complete with scenarios of joy, sadness, and complete empathy.
It is one thing to create an entertaining product about World War I and tell a story -- it is another to tell that story while dismissing the overall whitewashing of general World War I history taught in schools and to be able to provide facts and lessons through a valuable medium such as videogames. As a fan of our written history, I would not only like to thank Ubisoft Montpellier for sticking to what I was most concerned about i.e. telling a story about World War I without blemishing it... I feel it is also noteworthy enough to celebrate what the development team have crafted by going above and beyond what I had initially hoped. Mentions and depictions of foreign countries fighting the war effort (Canada, India, Tunisia - represent!), including heart-wrenching personal letters from both sides of the conflict illustrating that no matter our lineage or culture we are all human.
On the centenary "celebration" of one of the greatest infamous events in our history -- one in which we still feel the aftershocks today -- I feel overjoyed to experience something like this in an entertainment medium form that I've spent immersed and loved dearly for almost three decades of my life. And yet it is World War I. There are portrayals of trench warfare, there are portrayals of troops blindly running over no-man's land in the hope of a few more metres to build more trenches. But this one feels right. We witness the events of World War I through the eyes of four controllable characters (five if we demand to include the medical dog) and through all of these events we see many parts of the Great War. The launch of machine guns as a defensive mechanism, the introduction of gas warfare, the importance that nurses played upon the battlefield, the harrowing experience of artillery raining down upon people, and the debut of three weapons which were defining moments in both theatres of World War II - the tank, the aeroplane, and the flamethrower.
In terms of gameplay, the puzzles themselves are not troubling due to common sense, and veterans of adventure games may find them trivial, yet the biggest stickler of all adventure games is whether the puzzles themselves make any sense to what is happening to the character in the universe. Thankfully Valiant Hearts avoids this quagmire. Controls are simple and neat both with M&KB interface alongside controller of choice. So far there have not been any issues regarding playability and it has that Ubisoft Montpellier polish to it. My only downfall is the fact that, despite the characters speaking their own form of mumbled speech within the game that is easy to understand (French characters saying "merci" while American character says "thanks") - it's a little disheartening to hear Emile, a major French character, speak in an English accent during story sequences at the beginning of a chapter. Perhaps a harmless contra, but one that grinds my teeth in little ways. This game also modestly steals the "greatest title screen music" from Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy XIII respectively at the same time.
Don't let the 2D animated quality of the graphics fool you. This game is full of grim, yet majestic, atmosphere. The mere fact that Ubisoft Montpellier managed to capture the real-life concept that death is everywhere and these people struggled through an immense scale of adversity in order to live through over 4 years of hell should be enough to reconsider and think about what the "lost generation" went through.
Highly recommended.
Ive only gotten to chapter 2 but oh man! I love everything about this game. The story, music, and art style, so good!
But I cant stress this enough, if you have NVIDIA's 3D Vision and a capable 3D TV/monitor you NEED to play this game in 3D. Even though it says unsupported the 3D is freaking amazing. The depth perception in the background layers and the popping foreground, god it looks so good!
DO IT!
I might check this out on a second playthrough.
