Valiant Hearts: The Great War

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.