GrogHeads Reviews Making History: The Great War
Before they made the sequel, there was the original World War. Muzzy Lane’s take on World War I was recently released after a lengthy beta period, and our review teams gives it a go.
Jim Owczarski, 28 February 2015
Designing global strategy games in a digital environment requires a commitment to both craft and art. It requires an acute sense of what information, which details, can safely be kept hidden from the player — unless he really wants to know — and those which, if hidden, will leave players screaming at their monitors because they can’t figure out how to do something they really need to do. More, it requires a careful understanding of how to communicate events going on in the world around the player in ways that don’t introduce absurd tedium — I’m looking right at you Europa Universalis III — while simultaneously preventing head-slapping aggravation when the player suddenly realizes that the Sudan sued for peace in its war against the Anglo-Egyptian government 12 turns ago and he never noticed it.
My respect for what Muzzy Lane attempts in its “Making History: The Great War”, then, is great. I only wish I could say they’d done a better job in the event.
The topic isn’t a surprising one given the centennial observations of World War I and a number of other developers have offered their takes. If nothing else, Muzzy Lane’s is familiar as it uses the Sandstone engine previously seen in “The Calm and the Storm” and “The War of the World”. Players are the now-commonplace nigh-omniscient rulers of nations charged with the building of infrastructure, armies, technologies, and economies, and then guiding those they lead into the tempest of Europe in the years after 1912. Units are typically “division” sized (more on that in a bit) and the game. which one should note up front is turn-based, runs in one-week turns.
“The Great War” (hereafter TGW) does not skimp on the choice of nations to control. Every strategy guide you read for games of this type tells you that it’s a bad idea to try and learn a system from some remote corner of the globe, but I already know a great deal about this history of the British, French, German, American, &c., empires and definitely fancied the notion of playing out the first half of the 20th Century from the Emirate of Jabal Shammar
