On the centenary of the start of World War I, who would have thought that one of the most sensitive commemorations would be a video game? Nobody, that’s who.

But Valiant Hearts: the Great War is a breath of fresh air in an industry that seems to feel there is only one way to treat war; as a visceral, adrenalin-fueled kill-fest. Ubisoft had other ideas and gave us a heartfelt tale of four people and a dog.

Valiant Hearts is the antidote to the Call of Duty generation and it has to be applauded for that.  As Marie pointed out in her review, this is a war game that doesn’t put a gun in your hands and doesn’t reward you for head shots.  Now that’s unusual in itself, but so is the choice of war.

World War I was a messy, bloody conflict, without an obvious bad guy and perhaps that’s why games tend to steer clear. With a lack of Nazis or be-turbaned ne’er do wells, games may start to feel a moral ambiguity about war as pure entertainment and, well, that’s not the point is it? But that’s exactly the point of Valiant Hearts.

As we’ve come to expect from Ubisoft’s Ubiart experiments, Valiant Hearts looks exquisite. It adopts a bandes dessinnées style,  offering sepia toned landscapes, deft lines and washes of soft greys, gold and brown.

One scene uses silhouettes upon a near dark background, as a character sneaks out of a POW camp and escapes across the French countryside. Flares throw a sudden flash of light over the scene, but there’s no time to stand and marvel at its beauty. There are too many moments like these to mention, as every scene is a joy, even little details in the trenches and tunnels.

Throughout the game, there are a host of items to collect and each one delivers a drip-feed of history. Pick up dog-tags and you learn a bit about when they were designed. Pick up and read a short, moving excerpt of a letter.  You can pick it up and move on or you can take a moment to read it and enrich your experience.

Following the five characters with interlinking stories is a clever device which allows us to cover a lot of ground from 1914 to 1918.  The chapters cover the main battles, such as Verdun, Reims and the Somme.  And as the story moves on, the futility of the war becomes apparent. Soldiers from different sides help each other out of a bind, only for one to follow orders, resulting in the death of the other, just moments later.

However, Valiant Hearts doesn’t get everything right. At moments, the tone of the piece is thrown out of kilter by the pantomime villain, Baron Von Dorf, complete with dastardly moustache. It all goes a bit Wacky Races, which doesn’t fit well. I’m not saying we couldn’t do with some lightness among the dark, but the Baron was a German cliche too far.

In addition to the inconsistent tone, the gameplay doesn’t match up to the beauty and sensitivity of the story and characters. Fairly early on, I tired of the get to A, then head to D to pick up Y, return to A to get to B style puzzles.  Admittedly, as the game progressed, the missions became slightly harder. However, there are only so many variations on the lever and pulley theme.

Anna, the medic, offered us a rhythm action game, reminiscent of Guitar Hero or Dance Dance Revolution, which was bizarre, if sometimes tense. And then there were the car chases, which involved dodgy grenades and various obstacles in time to a famous piece of classical music. Despite the almost keystone cop feel to it, I actually quite enjoyed these sections, which lifted the mood just the right amount.

I really wanted to like this game more because it’s heart is in the right place and it dares to be different. In fact, I didn’t dislike it, I was just a little bit disappointed. It’s to Ubisoft’s credit that, with Child of Light, it set the bar so high,  making it difficult for the publisher to meet its own high standards, every time.  And it didn’t fall far short.

I’m glad the industry marked this important date and it’s impossible to imagine a game or development team who could have done it better.