I was a little worried when I started Over The Top: WWI, and it started asking me to choose a moustache and silly accent. It felt like it wasn’t taking things seriously. World War I was essentially a bunch of plucky young chaps of various races being fed into an industrial meat grinder. It was when the horrors of modern war were beginning to crystalize. It needed to be handled as such. Thirty minutes after selecting my magnificent moustache and monocle, however, a very different story was playing out.
I was standing in a bombed out trench, the sound of artillery fire thudding all around me. An engineer was desperately trying to build sandbags next to me, but a second later a bullet pings through his helmet. His body falls into the trench in front of me, as machine gun fire rips into the dirt all around. I’ve no idea where it’s coming from. I move forward, to try and take a shot, and a wall of flame immolates me. It’s pure chaos. Exhilarating, and slightly terrifying. Over The Top may be very janky at times, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t get the heart pumping.
Your Country Needs You
The bulk of my time with Over The Top: WWI was spent in the Conquest mode. This is a territory control mode, where one side begins with all the points and the other side have to attack and capture them. Sounds like the defender has the advantage, but in true World War One fashion, the sheer weight of numbers on the attacker side usually breaks through. That, combined with some flanking tactics, usually means a constant struggle to maintain capture. If you dig in too much, then mortars will blow you right out again.
Digging in, by the way, is Over The Top‘s most interesting mechanic. The world map is entirely destructible and, depending on class, you’ll spawn with a shovel. Given the war in question, that means trenches. Most of the playtime is spent running from trench to trench. It’s honestly great. Moving towards points usually means keeping the pressure on the enemy while the sappers extend the trenches. By the end, all the trenches connect and everyone’s fighting with flamethrowers and shotguns.
There’s also a decent range of tools and classes. You’ve got riflemen for your basic shooting, snipers for less basic shooting, specialists for pyromaniacs, stormtroopers for the impatient, engineers for those that love Minecraft, and officers for those that want to roleplay as cushy aristocrats. Officers do act as mobile spawn points though, and they can order a charge, giving everyone a bonus. Even if most officers treat that as the one single tool in their arsenal. Even when defending. There are also a range of tanks and planes, though they get snapped up quick so I couldn’t try them. I’m guessing flying is a bit tricky though, given how often I saw someone sail right into a tree.
The Long Night
Over The Top is quite rough around the edges though. Having everything being destructible means I was constantly getting caught on the scenery. Sometimes when it was floating in front of me. Getting out of trenches can be a hardship sometimes too. I would keep getting pulled back in, like I was wearing a bungee cord. Speaking of jank, the community is a bit polarising at the moment. There are some good players, but also a lot of people just spouting the most barrel scraping jokes you can imagine. Not one to play if you’re offended easily, I suspect. I just wish they’d think up better jokes.
Still, back to the game, there’s a lot to like in Over The Top. The shooting feels great, for one, and digging feels intuitive. It is missing some quality of life elements though. I think a medic class would be good, for one. If not that, at least a clearer way to see downed players. In my last game, I had three people behind me shouting for a medic and I was merrily sniping away. Speaking of orientation, spawning in can be very disorientating. Some indication of where we last died would be good, as it’s hard to remember a map when it’s busy being bombed to kingdom come.
But there’s a more insidious issue at the moment, I feel. Towards the end of my time with the game, I found myself tiring of it and I wasn’t sure why. The shooting still felt fun. Perhaps it was the short ‘Spawn to Death’ time, but that was kind of the point of the game. No, I feel like it’s the territory control aspect that’s doing it. It makes every game feel very similar. By the end you’re just jogging down a maze of trenches, rebuffing and being rebuffed in turn. Some more game modes, and different types of objectives, are called for I think. Something to stop each game from blending into the last so much.
Over The Top: WWI – Rough But Exhilarating
Still, I feel like Over The Top is a game of moments, rather than a big picture kind of scenario. Like other shooters of the type, it’s great at generating little stories. Like the time we held off an assault from the ruins of a destroyed building. Or the time a bloke came up to me screaming about artillery, shortly before I was coated in his new liquid form. While each game does tend to blend into the next, each one reliably had some moment that stuck out to me. It’s that which kept me coming back, and kept me pushing through the many deaths.
Flying Squirrel Entertainment have a core team of four people, so the jankiness is perfectly excusable. It’s still a fun game, and putting together the framework to have 100 vs 100 matches is very impressive. They also have a clearly laid out roadmap of content upgrades, so my hope is that Over The Top gets nicely tightened up as the months go by. It just needs a bit of extra spice to keep me coming back. Even without that, though, it’s still an excellent game that is great at getting the blood pumping. Shortly before you’re hit by a mortar, that is.
