Review: Gallipoli makes every bullet count
Video Games: This multiplayer WW1 shooter game succeeds with slow, confident gunplay
By Edward Brydalski
Five minutes with Gallipoli sold me on it, and 13 hours later, I’m glued to it.
Gallipoli is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter1 based on the Ottoman Front of World War I. Released on Aug. 20, it maintains “Very Positive” reviews on Steam and holds an average player base of over 2,000 people on Steam alone, according to SteamDB.
The game places you on both sides of famous battles in the Middle East. One team defends a series of outposts as the other team tries to push through them, one by one.
Gallipoli is the newest installment of Blackmill Games’ WW1 Game Series, now four games strong and over 10 years old. The series has always been known for its methodical gameplay. Gallipoli is no exception, but it boasts notable improvements.
Movement is slow, but smooth and well paced for the size of the maps. Construction is much improved, with sandbags, razor wire and spawn points now freely deployable at nearly any point on the map.
But most important of all is the gunplay, and it is weighty. Really weighty.
When you aim your rifle, it sways around the center of the screen, making long, accurate shots very difficult. Handguns accentuate the problem, swaying at a standstill and swinging wildly during movement.
And you’d better make those shots count. It’s a one-shot, one-kill world, and reloading takes an age. Sometimes, it is better to bring a knife to a gun fight.
Adding to the semi-simulation appeal, bullets are treated as projectiles of size and speed rather than hitscan2 laser beams. Bullets come from the barrel of your soldier’s gun model. So, if there is a wall, sandbag or rock between you and the enemy, it will not make it to your target, even if there is a clear path in the center of your screen.
Snipers must take note of this as well. Bullets travel at a fixed speed and suffer from bullet drop, so long-distance shooting requires compensating for distance and leading for moving targets.
This is the type of game to benefit from a large, high-resolution monitor. I’m spending more time than I’d care to admit hunched forward with my face mere inches from the screen, just to spot some flickering pixels a hundred meters in the distance. To me, this is a good thing, as the focus and execution of a long-range shot is quite satisfying. But casual players looking for quick and easy combat may want to look elsewhere.
The developers at Blackmill Games took great care in representing the arms and armaments actually used on the Ottoman Front. Whereas Battlefield 1 allowed players to run around with experimental machine guns and prototype tanks, Gallipoli takes the phrase “Standard Issue” seriously, but leaves room for some of the in-the-trenches cludge jobs seen in the field.
If you are a dime-a-dozen Rifleman, then you get a rifle. No sidearm. Good luck.
The specialist classes get more leeway with their loadouts. Bombers can choose between a pistol and some grenades, or forego firearms altogether and run with five grenades and a wooden club.
Squad Officers show their rank by having access to an imported Colt Single Action Army revolver, a rare object and signifier of status.
Light machinegunners get access to portable, fully automatic weapons, a luxury for the 1910s. Heavy machinegunners get even bigger guns capable of extreme suppression, but have to build and affix them to a spot.
And speaking of suppression, WOW. Gallipoli may have the best representation of suppression in a war game I’ve seen. The more bullets fly around you, the more you feel the effects. The screen starts to shake, the color drains from the environment and your soldier starts to tremble, making accurate fire all but impossible. There are even contextual reload animations, where the most panicked state takes the longest and shows an alternate animation where your soldier fumbles and flinches, trying to put a bullet in the chamber.
It’s the culmination of all these details that makes Gallipoli such a satisfying game. It toes the line between an ARMA4 simulation you need to prepare a week in advance and an arcade-like Call of Duty5 lobby that’s over and done within five minutes.
There is much more to be said: From the maps designed after historic battles and locations to the deep, deep character creation system, to the fact that it has full crossplay6 support. But Gallipoli’s dealbreakers and dealmakers are its pacing and gunplay. If you don’t like those, the rest won’t matter.
Give it a shot and see if you love it. Gallipoli may scratch an itch that other multiplayer shooters have not.
Gallipoli is available now for $29.99.
You can play it on PC through Steam and the Epic Games Store, and on XBOX and PlayStation.
Trailers
Glossary
- First-Person shooters are games that take place from the perspective of the eyes of the player character and involve shooting.
- Hitscan is a method of calculating whether damage occurs in a video game. Instead of simulating a projectile, a game using hitscan will detect whether the player’s crosshair intersects with a target at the moment of fire. If it does, the shot will count as a hit, regardless of the player’s distance to the target. Gallipoli does not use this method.
- Picture-in-picture (PiP) is a method of rendering optical scopes in video games. Rather than zooming in the player’s entire field of view, PiP only magnifies the area of the scope, leaving the rest of the view untouched. This method is considered more realistic, but typically takes more processing power to achieve.
- ARMA is a long-running game series involving large-scale military conflicts in a variety of time periods. It is lauded for its realistic simulation of weapon ballistics, vehicle handling, and squad tactics.
- Call of Duty is a long-running game series involving military operations in a variety of real and fictional environments. It is wildly popular and known for its fast-paced gameplay.
- Crossplay is a feature in multiplayer games available on multiple platforms. It allows players on consoles to play with players on PC or otherwise incompatible consoles.
