There are historical first-person shooters that try to capture the precise texture of their time: the limits of technology, the archaic military traditions, the hierarchy of command. Then there’s Isonzo, a World War I shooter where you can drink from a canteen to briefly clear your endurance threshold, which will have you sprinting with reckless abandon through Italy’s rugged war zones. A comrade at your flank could amplify those efforts by blowing a whistle to inspire his countrymen, helping them withstand the hail of gunfire pouring out from the regiments garrisoned across the valley. This playful approach to the Great War is infused with jittery trigger pulls, game-changing bombings and wacky, video game-esque perks, making Isonzo approachable for even the most casual of participants. It’s a philosophy that fills it with moments of bright, breezy fun, even if some of the turn-of-the-century embellishments feel like window dressing to what’s a pretty standard FPS at its core.
Isonzo is the third world war game developed by the Dutch studio Blackmill Games. The previous two, Verdun and Tannenberg, document the action on the western and eastern fronts, respectively. Isonzo shifts the action to the warmer climates of southern Europe — particularly the Adriatic highlands — where several clashes took place between the Kingdom of Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Like both previous installments, Isonzo is played in large-scale Battlefield-style combat over a constellation of contested control points. Blackmill has done an amazing job decorating the apocalyptic dregs of battle. The granite Dolomites pierce the sky above our humble soldiers, while crystal blue rivers ripple over dizzying cliffs. Yes, we may be risking life and limb as we slice through the dusty trenches and rocky outcroppings of the terrain, but Isonzo still manages to inspire a reckless sense of fearless adventure – a touch of Old Hollywood glamour. That’s saying something, given the many grim ends your soldiers will meet.
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Isonzo has exactly one game mode and follows a fairly conventional format: you spawn in your territory, rush to the front lines and try to either overcome your opponents’ entrenched troops, or fend off the wave of troops trying to dislodge you. . battalions, depending on whether you’re attacking or defending. With a full 48-player line-up – currently easy to get hold of – Isonzo captures the chaos of mechanized warfare: rifle grenades shoot past your helmet, mortars crack the cliffs, trenches are conquered with bayonet thrusts. This game is at its best when you and your party scramble up a hill through plumes of mustard gas and sparks from machine gun fire to And last but not least tip the scales and gain a foothold in No Man’s Land.
But unlike other more simulation-heavy World War I games, Isonzo is a modern first-person shooter that combines the brutal aesthetic of the period with a whole host of Call of Duty-esque design ideas. The weapons are period-appropriate – single-shot rifles with long reload times are the norm – but your soldier can equip combat advantages, as if they were falling into Verdansk, which can improve their dressing speed or decrease their weapon swing. In fact, with binoculars you can place waypoints over the heads of your rival soldiers, while green dots hover over your friendly units, as if the conscripts of 1917 suddenly had access to 21st century augmented reality.
These wrinkles make Isonzo easy to pick up for those who haven’t committed time to an Arma squad, but they do make it a little less authentic and compelling than some of its counterparts. In Beyond The Wire, another recent game from the Great War, the realism of the conflict is reproduced in great detail, to the point where you have to bolt on your own bayonet. Isonzo, meanwhile, celebrates all your headshots with a scorecard at the bottom of the screen, as if you just tagged someone with a Bullpup on De_Dust. That keeps the pace of the action high, while also making the kills feel less meaningful. After a while, you might forget you’re playing a World War I game at all.
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But that thematic flexibility has allowed Blackmill to make us feel righteously powerful on the battlefield. It is always possible to dominate the competition in Isonzo; you’re never helpless in a cold, continent-spanning death machine. Players who want to stay away from the action as much as possible can also find a role. Most of the six classes are designed for gunfights, but my favorite ended up being the officer, who is able to use a phone behind friendly lines to get the most out of 20th-century mechanization. You pull out a map of the war zone and paint a firing range over the parchment; Moments later, biplanes appear on the horizon to drop loads of hellfire and increase your score. (The easiest equation would be the Duty kill streaks, except these abilities can only be used by one class and from a fixed location.) It’s the perfect push-pull – officers exchange their manpower at the checkpoints to influence the tide of battle through big, wild invoking -swinging cooldowns – which makes Isonzo a lot less brainless than a pure war of attrition.
The other classes aren’t as unconventional as the Officer, but Blackmill still packs a few wrinkles into each of them to separate them from the basic grunts. The Engineer class has access to a rotating wheel filled with rudimentary weapons – sandbags, sniper shields, and so on – that add some obstacles to the chokepoints. The mountaineer brandishes a brass horn that magically increases soldiers’ rate of fire in their aura, and the Assault class is the only one that can bring fully automatic machine guns to the party. They all fit well into their roles, and together you can devise a complex battle plan full of fire suppression and cloaking smoke. After all, it’s always important to consider the position of your teammates in Isonzo as that’s the only way to avoid having a mortar fall on them.
Similarly, Isonzo studs his cards with spawn points to fabricate and barbed wire to cut, which alters the ebb and flow of the action, making it less like a static war of attrition. These additions give it more of a strategic bite, but at the end of the day you’ll spend most of your time crouching in an earthen barricade, firing your rifle at an infinite supply of overwhelmed foot soldiers. That’s how these wars are won and lost, and unfortunately it won’t be long before those orders are thin.
That’s Isonzo’s nagging problem: I never really felt transported to the heritage it so clearly seeks to honor. Here’s a loud, meaty, gorgeous World War I game on the surface, with a straight-forward first-person shooter simmering under the hood. Isonzo proudly bears the name of a decisive battle in military history, but I didn’t quite feel the weight of the setting. Instead, I mainly looked at my kill counter to make sure my shots hit their target.
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