Verdun Review

Review Verdun | With Battlefield 1, now Verdun and the upcoming Battalion 1944, World War 1 fans have some busy times on Xbox. Or not? Right off the bat things are clear that Verdun might not be worth your time. Read more about it in this review! 

THE GOOD

  • One of the few positive things I can say about Verdun is the level design. It feels like an authenticated battlefield. The trenches have a claustrophobic feeling and I’m sure that if the actual shooting mechanic was any good it would have provided some intense shooting.
  • It has a few nice touches about history, loading screens and the menu remind players that they are playing a world war game.

MIXED FEELINGS

  • Thumbs up for the developer to provide an offline mode but thumbs down for how they did it. Soldiers controlled by the computer randomly get stuck in the environment or simply refuse to shoot at you.
  • Controls don’t really feel accurate and some of the menu’s and character selection screen is confusing. Another thing that I absolutely hate is the reload animation, not only does it take ages (to be clear I don’t mind that, it is WW1 after all) but for some reason the animation regularly gets abrupted. You don’t always notice that, giving you some very cheap deaths because your weapon ran out of ammunition.
  • Visually the game doesn’t really strike out, it falls right between good and bad. I did love the trenches but the environment lacks detail and some polish. Animations feel stiff too.

THE BAD

  • My aim reticle is clearly on target but still the bullets fail to register, I can understand if this happens from a few meters away but when the enemy is three steps in front you.. aiming in general doesn’t feel right, a bit sluggish is the correct word.
  • Terrible audio, I always had the impression that the sound had a slight mute over it. Environment sounds are completely absent.
  • Server connection issues, if you want to play Verdun you currently have to add at least five or ten minutes before you finally find a working match. I’m not overreacting when I say that an error called”Unable to create/join Photon Cloud session” showed up at least 100 times. It doesn’t end with that, if you finally get into a battle you face some random disconnection too. It was an incredible annoying and frustrating experience, to be honest I had to use some extreme motivation solutions to continue playing Verdun for my review. Never before did I think, screw this I will stop playing and not write a review. I respect the developer, despite giving Xbox players such a messy game, they gave me a review code so I felt compelled to write-up something.
  • Verdun has one of the weirdest bugs that I have seen in a shooter game, it happens very often too destroying any kind of stealth approach or normal play. Please imagine, you are in the trench, one of the few colours that you see is brown, the trench opens up and what do you see in the distance? An enemy sniper hiding behind a tree, why did you see him so fast? For some reason his entire character model is complete white or a mixed pink and purple… I have no idea why it happens but I’m not lying when I say that such things happen every single time, sometimes even two or three players face this annoying bug. Needlessly to say it kills any kind of immersion, getting to finally play an online game is a monumental task, I expected that when the server finally worked the game wouldn’t give me such weird bullshit.

Score: 23% | Damn, I wish Verdun came on a disc so I could unleash my anger on something physical. Error screen, error screen and error screen, that’s almost everything that you’ll see while playing Verdun. If you manage to finally get into a game you’ll face some annoying bugs that totally destroy any kind of immersion or fun. Seriously, Verdun is a massive failure on Xbox. I sincerely hope that the developer will fix the issues, I can’t imagine that anyone is having fun right now with Verdun. (On Xbox, haven’t played other platforms)