Elsewhere, Freddie is an American, far from home, seeking revenge on a German baron, and Anna is a student turned nurse, trying to rescue her father, a kidnapped scientist whose research is now being put to use in sinister ways.Īs the last two points suggest, a game that generally seems eager to tell a story from a modest soldier's-eye viewpoint sporadically suffers strange moments of action-cinema hysteria. Karl, meanwhile, is a German neighbour who finds himself deported from France and enlisted by the enemy as soon as fighting breaks out. Emile's an elderly French farmer, conscripted despite his age but eager to do his best. Telling a simple story of friendship surviving the cruel responsibilities of conflict, play switches between three men and one woman (oh, and a dog), caught up in a war that has completely mangled their lives. Valiant Hearts is not a great piece of design, then, but it is still a strange, memorable and often powerful game nonetheless - and one, I'm tempted to say, that only a publisher as dashing and romantic as Ubisoft would ever try to put together. It's a visual delight, and the quick, occasionally hesitant lines of the pen-and-ink drawings work with the stocky, stoical cast to provide an emotional force that survives the bizarre tonal shifts of the narrative and some fairly undistinguished challenges. Ubisoft Montpellier's puzzle-adventure tells the story of a handful of characters drawn into the muddy slaughter of the First World War by relying on the help of hand-drawn 2D sketches brought to shuddering, juddering life with the same UbiArt framework that powers the Rayman and Child of Light games. There is something of Guys and that mission to Valiant Hearts: The Great War, as well as something of the noble European tradition of taking comic-book art sufficiently seriously to rescue it from the people in tights and capes.
PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One: £11.99īefore war photographers came war artists - dashing, romantic figures like Constantin Guys (his full name, irresistibly, seems to have been Ernest-Adolphe-Hyacinthe-Constantin Guys) who captured the murderous chaos of conflict in Crimea with a few deft swipes of the pen, and who brought the hidden realities of a distant war home to western audiences in a manner that people could at least hope to understand emotionally as well as intellectually.
0 kommentar(er)
