Valiant Hearts Review

News just in from our brave boys on the Ubisoft Front: another game about WAR is out, but surprisingly it’s not another shooty shooty bang bang but a point-and-click style puzzle adventure with a wealth of emotional depth, character and something that is hard to come by in games and therefore all the more valuable for its rarity: a distinct flavour. A distinctly European flavour. A French flavour. Mmmm.

But I haven’t actually mentioned if it’s any good.

And I’m not going to

…Just yet.

First we need to talk about presentation. It’s pretty. My gosh is it pretty. But it’s not just nice to look at, it sounds good too. The warm, grandfatherly voiceover (Dave Pettitt) leads you down the narrative path, half expectant of a Werther’s Original and his sombre tones know how to play your heartstrings at just the right pitch. The conversely silent characters speak to you through diary entries which add insight while the dialogue - presented through emotive pictographic references - give the air of a classic Disney short. But in terms of presentation, it is of course the artwork that shines through the mud, murk and violence of the trenches. Bold, bright, full of life and personality. Stylised and sharp.

Usually I would tell you that it’s not how a game looks but how it plays that counts (more on that later, I promise) but that’s because all too often we, as consumers, are faced with yet another game which has had so much time and money pumped into it in order to make it look as big,  bold and lifelike as possible that the developers have forgotten to give it any actual life. And this game does have life. It’s a reminder that when it comes to looks it’s not a graphical powerhouse of an engine that matters; not how many mo-capped mega-zega pixels can be pumped out, but art direction plain and simple. The art direction in Valiant Hearts makes it feel like you’re playing something crafted by old-school Disney or their Japanese contemporaries over at Studio Ghibli, but with that distinct European feel.

While developed by the French, don’t fret about the story being one-sided; the narrative follows conscripts from the German and French armies, an American volunteer, a Belgian wartime nurse and a dog (probably the closest the game gets to the  Call Of Duty series) in the First World War. Their stories carry humanity and warmth, packed side-by-side with the brutality of war. It also comes with a series of photographs and objects with descriptions designed to educate you on the details of certain WWI battles, equipment or practices.    

But heart only counts for so much and if you want a game that goes beyond something nice to look at, you need decent gameplay. Valiant Hearts feels so desperate to give the player something to do that it manages to undermine itself on the vital Gaming Front. Repeatedly, you will be thrown gameplay titbits: you’ll be asked to dodge falling bombs, time your run through gun emplacement fire and dodge guards in sections that feel like they’ve been taken from the cutting room of a half-arsed Metal Gear Solid rip-off. Here the mechanics serve to only break down the pace of the game; they interrupt the flow of the story and are too rudimentary to ever be satisfying. The main theme of the story that ‘war is hell and life precious’ is completely lost when said life can be rekindled over and over again due to the game’s reload-and-retry response to dying. The puzzles feel more at home in a game like this but they rarely tax the brain, nor prove a wealth of imagination.   

The bottom line is that the gameplay just doesn’t live up to the high standards set by the presentation. It’s a shame.

Valiant Hearts is a nice game. Nice being a word equally complimentary but damning in its pedestrianism. It’s a game worth experiencing;  a visual and audial treat; a heart-warming and heart-breaking yarn. But as a game… it falls ever so slightly short of its target.