The Great War: Western Front™
The Great War: Western Front is the definitive WW1 strategy game. Play a deciding role in history with this real-time tactical experience as you take charge in the iconic Western Front from 1914 to 1919. Pick your faction and lead your forces to victory.
The Great War: Western Front™ is a strategy, rts and world war i game
developed by Petroglyph
and published by Frontier Foundry.
Released on March 30th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 9 languages: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish - Spain, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese and Turkish.
It has received 2,732 reviews of which 1,867 were positive and 865 were negative resulting in a rating of 6.7 out of 10. 😐
The game is currently priced at 6.99€ on Steam and has a 80% discount.
The Steam community has classified The Great War: Western Front™ into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at The Great War: Western Front™ through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64bit
- Processor: Intel i5-4590 / AMD FX-8350
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 390
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 13 GB available space
- Additional Notes: SSD Recommended
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I've been waiting for a WW1/Trench Warfare game at the tactical level for a long time. I was really intrigued by the idea of their turn-based strategic mode combined with a focus on tactical battles. Most WW1 games tend to either be strategic or a shooter. So I was instantly sold on this game once I saw it advertised before release. I think they hit the mark, but not as well as they could have. I also think they abandoned the game too soon, but they at least did add mod-support and the workshop, but despite a few decent mods the game never really garnered enough support to have a community driven continuation of the game through mods. One of my biggest cons/disappointments is the strategic layer of the game. It is pretty bare and it mostly consists of shifting troops around to different hexes to defend/assault positions. There is no real persistence in your actions. You have no real options on hurting the enemy's economy nor can they hurt yours through taking territory. There are no supply lines or positions that give you an advantage for holding them. Enemy units that you can almost entirely destroy in one battle will immediately be replenished and only take a slight morale debuff for your next attack. Your own units are the same, you do lose money to replenish them but it's done instantly. The enemy can attack your hex and you have no tactical reason to hold reserves back for follow-up attacks as you'll take the morale debuff no matter how many troops you lose or if you win/lose/draw the battle. This lack of persistence hurts the strategic layer significantly. It also harms the tactical level as it removes some difficult choices you may have to make while attacking to preserve forces for a possible defense later on. You just never really see your actions provide any results. The tactical level of the game is the core and meat of the gameplay. It is fun for a while, but it has its own problems. Namely economic balance. You have access to many unique tools in order to defend/assault but often they are so overpriced compared to the base options that you hardly ever use them. You'll overwhelmingly use the basic light/heavy artillery barrages rather than creeping barrages, airbursts, gas, etc. While those other options can be devastating and cool, they are priced so far above the base choices compared to the damage they actually do or utility they provide. Defense like Machine Guns and Mortars are very quickly neutered by enemy artillery despite being extremely expensive. I only found consistent success with those when I unlocked the concrete bunkers at the highest tech tier where they actually would survive multiple barrages and couldn't be stopped with a light suppression barrage. These options are good and unique, but the economy balance is so poor that the player often has no reason to utilize them compared to the base options. Last biggest con is the battlefield persistence. They advertised on this pretty hard before the game released, and while it was technically there on release it felt like the misled people on it. Some updates came out and helped, like with corpse persistence and such, but essentially how it works is: A map is decided by which hex you attack out of into which hex you attack into. Every time a tactical combat is started/played in that hex, the battlefield will develop a preset level of additional "destruction" when you fight the next battle. Continue fighting battles out of that same hex into the same enemy hex, eventually the battlefield will be a mess of craters and ruins. Corpses and craters you specifically cause from your own artillery and combat are NOT persistent. If you attack from a different hex into the same enemy hex, the destruction of the map is entirely different and on a different counter. So unless you are attacking from the same hex into the same hex every turn and never capturing that hex, you'll likely never see any large change in the map's destruction. So is it persistent? Yeah, technically. But not in any way you'll likely notice significantly and once again, you own actions like shooting down planes or destroying tanks in No Man's Land wont persist into your next fight. This now removes the visual layer of your actions in the game. We can see a consistent theme here. The good thing is: MODS HELP THIS SIGNIFICANTLY. There are a few good ones that help with adding tactical battle persistence and re-balancing the economy. Unfortunately none of these really change the strategic layer, but this at least makes the core game play feel better and less repetitive. So, I've sat here and ranted about cons for a while haven't I? I also recommended the game. I did this specifically because the game could have been so much more. It is fun, even in vanilla, but the half-baked strategic layer and the player actions not being visually represented or having any real changes on the strategic layer really drop any long term replayability of this game. Once the tactical battles lose their fun, the game stops being fun. When you play the campaign you will play a lot of tactical battles and after a while, even in your first playthrough, it will start to get repetitive and the strategic layer doesn't have enough to keep you involved. So what is good about it? The tactical battles (especially with mods like OverTheTop) feel good. Defending from a massive attack or trying to plan a coordinated assault will keep you occupied for decent while. They really give you a great view at how destructive WW1 could be, and watching thousands upon thousands of troops get scythed down when your artillery ends sooner than you wanted or grinding through tens of trench melees is very epic. You will drop A LOT of artillery down, and watching the enemy line erupt in fire and smoke as your drop that artillery is just awesome. When you do finally put it all together and watch as your flamethrowers and grenadiers just wreck enemy trenchlines under the cover of a perfectly planned and coordinated artillery assault brings a massive feeling of reward. It's one of the only WW1 games that does the tactical level like this and it honestly works very well for the first 10-25 hours. The strategic layer is not difficult to learn and it has enough to keep you going for a playthrough. The tech tree feels reasonable and done well. It's not like trying to learn a Paradox game, so if you are new to strategy games I think it's approachable and isn't extremely punishing. I think the game is good for 1-2 playthroughs, 20-40 hours. If you mod it, potentially a bit more. The price isn't terrible at $35 USD, but it should likely be $20-$25 at this point. If you are looking to scratch that trench warfare itch and want a tactical WW1 game, it's a decent option and I still find myself going back to it occasionally. However I absolutely recommend picking up a few of the mods to extend some of the enjoyment and fix some of the economy balance to prevent the gameplay from getting too stale too soon and add a bit of persistence to the tactical battles so you can bask in the corpse littered fields of your failed assaults or successful defenses. The game really nails the feel and some of the historical battle scenarios are fun and show where the game tends to shine with its tactical battles. It just needed some extra attention to flesh out the strategic layer and add some weight to the players actions and this game likely would have been far more successful than it was. I give it a 7/10. It's good enough to get the job done and it doesn't feel like a waste of money, but I think there were some large missed opportunities and balance issues that really hamper the game after the spectacle wears off in the first dozen or so hours.
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I don't normally write reviews - most of the games I play are already either mostly positive or above. I see a lot of comments about bugs and abandonware. So far, after playing through 3 and a half campaigns, The only 'bug' I've experienced, is when you're moving your troops through the trenches, and if the trench is full, they get stuck or go over the top (and the timing is wrong, they get nailed). Seems like more of a design feature than a bug to me. One design feature that I would like to change (and there is a mod for this) is sending your troops over the top - sometimes they run around and come out in single file, but the time it takes them to do that, half your suppression barrage has already been fired. As for abandonware - Pffft. The game is complete and once you play it a bit, it has a deceptive amount of depth. Want cheaper artillery rounds? Get the artillery shell cache - half price artillery barrages, but just hope they don't blow up your cache. The AI will counterattack your trenches - he doesn't just sit there and roll over. Brilliant. I love that. I saw someone say just use artillery to suppress and rush and there's no real use for tanks. That's great, if you're artillery is in range for the whole map, and you have enough of it to suppress the trenches behind the ones you are rushing, otherwise you'll be writing a lot of letters home to the families of your dead troops. Tanks however, can draw fire further up the map to give your guys a chance to break through. Or you can use bombers to blow up the MG nests, if you have enough supply left. Careful management of your supplies is crucial to a win. Spend too much on artillery and you won't have enough left for the necessary troops and barrages and bombers. Spend too much on siege bombardments, same thing. Spend too much gold on supply depots, run out of coin. Same thing on defence - MG nests are essential, but where you place them is just as important. Put them in the front trench, and they'll be the first thing to go. Get carried away and put them everywhere, and you have no troops, or not enough troops left. Which will be a real surprise when you see that first enemy tank on the battlefield and he rolls right over you. And if you still find the game too easy, go and customise the difficulty and make the AI really aggressive, but keep his health the same as your troops (or not, give him more). Good luck. This game is absolutely worth it. I got it on special for $15 AUD, and after playing it, I would have happily spent double that. I don't see why people are calling it abandonware - the game has everything it needs, and based on what I know about WW1 (which is a lot more than most people) it's one of the better WW1 games out there. And I haven't experienced any bugs or crashes. Ignore the reviews about abandonware and bugs, and go over the top and take some trenches.
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A worthy strategy game for World War I enthusiasts. The only issue is that simulating World War I can be a bit... repetitive, for lack of a better word. In the early game especially, your tactics are the same almost every battle: line up a dozen or so squads in your trenches, bombard the hell out of the enemy trenches, then send your men over the top and watch as 40% of them get cut down before reaching the enemy and another 20% get cut down fighting them. Repeat two or three more times to capture a single tile on the map, IF you didn't lose too many men. It gets better in the late game when you unlock different tactics and armor to make breakthroughs easier. But it'll be quite a few hours in your campaign before you get to that point. Still, I find the game fulfills its purpose well.
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If it was possible, this would be a mixed one for me. A lot of other reviews mention the devs "abandoned" the game. Once you know the context it makes sense and unlike others, I applaud the devs for what they did do. They had a bad release. The game shipped with a lot of bugs and it didn't sell well. The devs stuck around long enough to fix all of the major bugs. Are there still some minor ones? Sure, but they are more of a minor annoyance and will rarely impact your game play. Keep this in mind when reading older reviews, especially the negative ones that mention major bugs or cheating/crappy AI. Even after this was all fixed, the bad release doomed the game. Devs are a business and they had to move on. Apparently, they had planned a ton of DLC, but for what it's worth it's not a bad game. As I said, they stuck around long enough to squash the major bugs and added features / QOL improvements that most were asking for. Most devs would have dropped it instead of doing that, so good on them for that at least. As others have stated, gameplay can get repetitive, but i think that is the nature of the kind of war you are fighting more than anything. Most of the stuff that people wanted, like persistent battlefields are there (kind of, but not in the exact way most wanted it) and the Workshop has some mods that fix it further and make it so bodies and craters stick around. That being said, in closing, do not pay $35 for this game or whatever asinine price they have listed. If you want to criticize the devs do it for grossly overpricing the game. If you like WWI though or just want to try a different style of RTS that hasn't been done before, grab it on sale. It's 65% off during the current summer sale and it is definitely worth that price.
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TLDR: All in all a decent game. Grab it on sale if you enjoy slow thoughtful combat. Probably not for you if you prefer the reflex/APM style tactical combat like Star Craft. Unit path finding isn't great and definitely the most frustrating aspect of the game. But late game most frustrations are dissipated and you have enough tools that combat becomes interesting and fun Good but not Great. Definitely captures the slog of a war that WW1 was. Most of my issues stem from the poor path finding that most people are complaining about. Occasionally a unit will get obliterated and I won't understand what happened to them which is frustrating. But ultimately, it's a decent game. Learning to use artillery, researching tanks, and learning to exploit trench blind spots is what takes the game from a real dumb grind to tactically puzzle that you need to work through. The time limit is dumb and I wish you could turn it off, but you've eventually become much more effective in tactical battles that it won't be a factor. Espionage was a bit of let down and wasn't really worth investing research in. The later espionage tech can be useful but it's just too much wasted research points in order to get there. Tanks are the game changer and definitely make combat more interesting.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 18 November 2024 21:04 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 16 January 2025 22:26 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:34 |
| Steam reviews | 22 January 2025 03:51 |
Online players
157
Developer
Petroglyph
Publisher
Frontier Foundry
Release
30 Mar 2023
Platforms