Valiant Hearts: The Great War

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a truly impressive experience that manages to focus on the realities of World War 1 without becoming a dull or upsetting experience. It adds just enough cheerful moments to stay upbeat and you're certainly going to care and fall in love with the main characters, especially the small dog.

Valiant Hearts, by using the war as a backdrop and avoiding too much direct conflict, pays tribute to the 16 million that perished in The Great War 100 years ago and does it with humour, pathos and melancholy.

The game is a moving, stylish experience. [Aug 2014]

I’ve never been much of a history buff, but maybe I would be if more games like Valiant Hearts: The Great War existed. Between the artistic backdrops and the soldierly tasks you commit, both right and wrong, Ubisoft Montpellier retells the events of World War I in amazing detail. Yet, the story is always about the people on the frontlines and what they endured, not the politics.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a game full of character. Even though it deals with one of humanity's bloodiest chapters it is not an extremely violent game. It delivers its purpose which is to educate about the Great War, and it does not fail to deliver the necessary feel to the proper ending.

Valiant Hearts is an emotion-driven and beautifully presented game that deals with World War 1. It combines action-adventure gameplay with great storytelling and imparts knowledge of the historical background. Although the gameplay itself and the puzzles are simple and some action sequences are annoying, Valiant Heart is a clear recommendation for players above 12 years with even the slightest interest in history.

Touching, exciting and all-round beautiful adventure somewhat tarred by its monotonous gameplay and the ludicrous image of the Big Bad Enemy. And it is almost a perfect way to explain the concept of war to your kids.

Valiant Hearts is not going to pretend to be a colorful history textbook: gameplay does not allow you to doze off. A leisurely pace of puzzles is punctuated by action at the front line. Playing cat-and-mouse with security guards during the escape from the camp are replaced by blistering chases on clunkers. [September 2014, p. 74]

Although far from a traditional adventure, Valiant Hearts has a strong setting and story that exposes the worst aspects of war and the best of human relationships.

A very different, beautifully constructed and compelling look at the horrors of war. [Aug 2014, p.58]

A story excellently narrated, set in the First World War scenes. It is beautiful, poignant, atmospheric, and informative at the same time. From a gameplay point of view, Valiant Hearts is simple, yet enjoyable adventure game crossed with a platformer that sometimes lightly cribbs from itself. However, thanks to its enormous charm you will certainly forgive it.

While it certainly has flaws, we’ll still wholeheartedly recommend Valiant Hearts to anyone, as it offers a beautiful and respectful tale of one of the most gruesome periods in modern history.

If Valiant Hearts’ gameplay could match most of its storytelling, it’d probably be the best game of the year to this point. As it stands, it’s still a remarkably beautiful piece of interactive entertainment that does a fantastic job of showing players a piece of history in a way that’s easily accessible and yet emotionally engaging.

Valiant Hearts isn't perfect...but it's still pretty great. It may not be completely tear-jerking, but it's still touching. The story may not be one I'll remember in detail decades from now, but it's still strong. The message may occasionally get lost in the gameplay, but it still rings true in the end.

These problems don’t dilute Valiant Hearts’ message, however. Rarely has war been examined with so much honesty and earnestness in a videogame. It only makes us yearn for more games that were less about guns and more about the people behind them.

A touching and bold portrayal of World War One in wonderful animated style, Ubisoft Montpellier’s Valiant Hearts shows that videogaming doesn’t have to be an Anthem for Doomed Youth.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is a superbly titled game. It is a valiant effort at a sincere depiction of war by developers whose hearts were clearly in the right place, telling a gripping story that is still respectful of its source.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War is one of the most original games of the year. It deals with a difficult theme and skillfully shows heavy emotions by picturing a war from an unusual perspective. A great story and superb audio-video aspect create an almost perfect game, although some simplifications and issues distort this image. Still, I will think about Valiant Hearts for a long time.

Despite taking shape as a rather unambitious adventure game, Valiant Hearts: The Great War nonetheless tells a beautiful story of loss and companionship with overwhelmingly evocative success.

A visually beautiful game that deftly moves between moments of joy and moments of tragedy, and ultimately doesn't shy away from the fact that "great" is just about the last thing any war should be called.

Seen purely as a game Valiant Hearts is average at best. But it's not just a game, but an interactive and therefore sustained-history lesson about one of the darkest chapters in human history.

It would have been nice if the developers could decide what game they want to make. On one hand, we have a failed attempt to tell an engaging story. On the other hand, series of puzzles would benefit from a higher difficulty level. Valiant Hearts is disappointing, but still not bad. [Sept 2014, p.56]

A game with its fair share of strengths and weaknesses invites us on a trip inside the WW1 trenches to see the real heroes of the war.

Valiant Hearts works from a novel concept, and is loaded with brilliant ideas — hell, it's great just to see a war from the perspective of a country other than America—but Ubisoft's lack of self-control ultimately makes it less impactful than it should have been. It's still a worthwhile experience, though it could have been so much better if Valiant Hearts left us wanting more.

The subject material is ghastly, but Valiant Hearts has the right mix of emotion and entertainment to make enduring the Great War worthwhile.

While Valiant Hearts struggles to make sense of itself as a game, in its odd, playful innocence and in its focus on four friends (and a dog) it at least offers a fleeting human perspective on a new kind of war that turned out to be far, far worse in its mechanised violence than anybody was quite expecting.