Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a hell where courage can be found in the most hopeless times. A story of friends and family ripped apart by the first World War amidst puzzles, platforming, and action, it tries it all, even too much in the scope of its mood. Valiant Hearts nonetheless beats with a passion, if not an unpredictability. Its emotional feats are nothing but astounding, testifying to the best and worst war can brings out in its fighters.
The plot, taken from real wartime letters, is one of five characters bound by grief and courage through death and disaster: Emile, a French farmer sent to fight, and Karl, a German recruit married to Emile’s daughter, having to leave his wife and baby son behind. They join Anna, a French nurse; and Freddie, an American bent on revenge, along with a faithful rescue dog, Walt. Over the course of four years they must travel across war torn Europe, depicted as a side scrolling landscape dotted with platforms, ladders, puzzles, and enemies.
The fourth game to run on the UbiArt engine, Valiant Hearts boasts the look and feel of a graphic novel within a classic 2D side-scrolling and the play area often splits as if two panels of a comic were on a page, giving you information about activity off screen. The parallel layers give an impeccable sense of depth and its portrayed horrors remain effectively chilling. This is a game in which you march over battlefields and bodies, its grim reality inescapable as much as its characters’ heartfelt bonds.
Characters have short lines of dialogue, all of it subtitled, and beautifully captured within their journals you’ll unlock throughout the game. Tasks are instead given to you via icons in speech bubbles appearing over an NPC’s head. A soldier’s dog may need water in his bowl, so an image of such is shown for you to give to him to progress. Historical items and facts are included in each level despite the tedium involved in collecting them all, though the game clocks in at an impressive 7-8 hours for a downloadable.
The platforming is very simple and without a jump, you’re limited to climbing over small obstacles or up ladders, and the puzzles are less than taxing. Objects needed to progress are usually nearby and if you’re a veteran of such games yourself, you’ll usually hone in one where to go. Rather than fitting A into B, you have to find C, exchange it for D and then arrange some pipes for E which can be traded for B. Rarely did I spend more than ten minutes on a puzzle, if not because I forgot one of my characters’ new abilities.
The always endearing Walt is possibly the best puzzle mechanic. With him, you can push levers out of reach and pull passersby from the rubble, and makes for the most interesting back and forth while micromanaging several solutions.
Puzzles are broken up by occasional stealth and arcade sections, mostly as Freddie. You get to drive and fire a tank in two sequences, but pushing the stick and continually hammering the fire button will get you to the end of the level just as well, so little skill is required. Anna has a heartbeat-driven button matching mini game to heal the wounded and, although nothing graphic is shown, it’s rather disturbing to hear the soldiers cry as you remove bullets and rushing to find medication for a rapidly dying soldier.
The music is amazing and always suits the onscreen action, and a particular highlight is an into-the-screen taxi race through Paris, set to the Can Can. It’s almost a rhythm action game with obstacles appearing in time with the music and then, for a little variation, it segues in to waltz and the two taxis hem you in on either side. As the music plays, the cars sway from side to side and you must match their moves, as if you were dancing. The level ends with one last frenetic blast of the Moulin Rouge classic with the bombs and obstacles fantastically timed to the music.
There are certainly a number of moments that feel out of place, even irreverent regarding its subject matter. A number of animations apparently meant to be amusing clash with the sobering nature of the game, brief as they are, and its literal mustache twirling Baron von Dorf is especially odd. Meanwhile, the game refreshingly focuses on narrative than action. Emile knocking out soldiers with his ladle is about as violent as it gets and even when you wire a bridge to explode, the soldiers will notice run off before you detonate the dynamite.
By its end, Valiant Hearts lives up to its name brilliantly, bringing its characters together in one of the moving moments of the year. What draws each of their arcs together beautifully redeems its shortcomings, as Karl, Emile, and Anna’s stories all come to its climactic and distressing conclusion. Its shocking finale results in what can only be described as unexpected and uncompromising in its gut-wrenching death, and not likely to leave a dry eye in many rooms.
Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a tale of two games, one half a serious, of heartbreak and historical theatre; the other of cartoonish villains chucking dynamite stick while doing a jig. Somewhere it finds a balance, its heart never lost among its quirks. War makes men mad, and Valiant Hearts surely proves that it can also forge the most heroic.