Battlefield 1 lets you play as an Anzac soldier at Gallipoli

IF you have ever wondered what it might have been like on the front line during WWI a new video game has answered that question. Welcome to Battlefield 1.

WORLD War I is not particularly familiar ground to gamers — a DVD copy of every game title set during the world-changing conflict probably wouldn’t fill a shoebox — which is a surprise, given the era is rife with the sort of stories and opportunities to make excellent games with.

As someone who read entirely too many Biggles books as a kid, has been enthralled by the epic film Lawrence of Arabia numerous times (and has a well-read copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom on his bookshelf) and is a huge fan of Blackadder Goes Forth, I have been waiting a very long time for someone to finally make an accessible, fun, modern World War I computer game.

That someone is EA Dice and that game is Battlefield 1.

Published by EA on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4, the latest instalment in the Battlefield series of multiplayer first-person shooters puts the player smack-bang in the middle of World War I, aka The Great War. And in what is possibly a first in gaming history, you can play as an Anzac soldier at Gallipoli in one of the missions.

Admittedly this isn’t first time World War 1.0 has graced computer screens — there have been a few excellent WWI flight simulators over the years, and tower defence game Toy Soldiers used the setting to good effect — but the gritty Verdun is the only other WWI historical FPS I’m aware of. It’s actually a surprise there haven’t been more WWI FPS games and I’m glad someone finally had a cunning plan to rectify that egregious oversight.

There are effectively two disparate elements to Battlefield 1 — the multiplayer aspect and a separate single-player campaign. The single-player element comprises a series of poignant War Stories, telling the tale of a WWI British tank crew, an Italian soldier in the Alps, an Anzac runner at Gallipoli, an American pilot, a member of the US Harlem Hellfighters regiment on the Western Front, and a Bedouin woman fighting with Lawrence of Arabia in Palestine.

The war stories are certainly well-presented and thoughtful and don’t generally stray too far from the accepted “War is hell and World War I was a pointless bloodbath” narrative. This point is brilliantly illustrated in the powerful introduction level, which makes it very clear exactly what you’ve gotten yourself into and what a nightmare the Western Front was.

Battlefield 1’s developers deserve kudos for giving players the chance to experience some of the other theatres of WWI besides the Western Front — notably the Italian Alps, Gallipoli and Palestine — as well.

It’s a truism history is written by the winners but personally, I would have liked the chance to see a story from the other side of the trenches as well — perhaps to play as a German Zeppelin crew member fending off the Royal Flying Corps, or to get some idea what it must have been like for an Ottoman soldier fighting Lawrence of Arabia’s guerilla army.

Sure, you can play as the Germans and the Ottomans in multiplayer, but that’s not quite the same thing as getting an actual story from their perspective as opposed to simply being The Red Team.

Despite the attention to detail — and there is a lot of it there, particularly in the weapons — this is not a historically accurate game. It’s what World War I would be if it was a Michael Bay film, with non-stop explosions, automatic gunfire, destruction, chaos and bullets flying everywhere while the laws of physics duck outside for a cheeky smoko break.

The serious military historian in me wants to be somewhat disappointed by this, but the gamer side of me is having entirely too much fun strafing and bombing hapless opposing players from the safety of a Sopwith Camel biplane or ramping an RNAS armoured car over an enemy entrenchment while firing a machinegun at them to be distracted with pedestrian concerns about complete authenticity.

There are several modes in multiplayer — where the squad selection screen looks rather like a steampunk rock band album cover for their eagerly awaited release Ack Emma/Pip Emma — and most of said modes will be familiar to anyone who’s been anywhere near a multiplayer FPS before.

One interesting new addition is a mode involving a carrier pigeon. The idea is one player on a team captures a pigeon and is trying to write a message to be carried by it, while being defended by their teammates as the opposing team tries to kill them and get the pigeon for themselves to do the same thing.

Successfully releasing the pigeon and having it get off the map calls in an artillery strike on the enemy’s position. Managing to shoot the pigeon before it escapes prevents the barrage but does not appear to unlock a “The Flanders Pigeon Murderer” achievement, however.

The graphics are excellent and the multiplayer gameplay is fast and furious, which is pretty much standard for a Battlefield game. The environment is highly destructible — buildings come crashing down spectacularly when shelled and the battlefield shifts and changes as spawn points are captured or lost.

There are four different classes — assault, support, medic and scout — available, all with slightly different ability — assault has antitank grenades, support has a light machine gun, the medic can revive downed comrades and the scout has a sniper rifle. Vehicles including tanks, aircraft and motorbikes are also present, along with field guns, mortars and ack-ack (anti-aircraft) guns. In some modes, if a team is getting particularly thrashed, reinforcements in the form of a crewable giant Zeppelin or an armoured train show up in an effort to even things up.

I encountered a few lag issues and some curiously bullet-resistant enemies at times, but otherwise the major gameplay issues I encountered were from unpleasant players carrying on in the chat window — which again, is both easily tuned out and also no surprise to anyone who’s played a multiplayer FPS before.

There are a mind-boggling number of WWI-era firearms in the game, ranging from those widely issued in the conflict through to experimental or prototype weapons; and that’s without getting into the various shovels, pickaxes, clubs and knives available as melee weapons. WWI combat was a brutal affair and Battlefield 1 doesn’t shy away from this.

While the chaotic multiplayer contrasts with the sober and poignant single-player campaign and the lower-tech setting may not appeal to everyone, personally I think the series has not only survived the change of setting but also introduced a welcome shake-up for the FPS genre in the process.

Despite the initially jarring nature of the Big Budget Action Movie approach to WWI — and I accept that may not sit well with some people, while further suggesting those people are not the game’s target audience anyway — this is the most fun I’ve had with the Battlefield series in years.

World War I itself may have been a largely pointless and horrific slaughter-fest, but Battlefield 1 is a standout addition to the FPS canon — and hopefully will also inspire a new generation of gamers to learn more about the realities of one of the most pivotal conflicts in history.