Video games have always had an uneasy relationship with war. Using it as a setting is a shortcut to explosive action and easy-to-understand heroes and villains. Yet the fact that it’s also the source of death and trauma to millions in the real world makes it an issue that needs to be tackled with a degree of thought and sensitivity, two things for which the games industry is not always known. As games get increasingly realistic and emotionally involving, it’s harder to make excuses for their occasionally gauche attempts at representing human conflict.
This Christmas’s three biggest triple-A blockbusters are united in their desire to tell stories of internecine warfare, even if they can’t quite agree on whether to whoop it up or get all Siegfried Sassoon. Battlefield 1 (PS4, Xbox One, PC) takes the latter approach in its depiction of the first world war. Told through a series of short, disparate stories, from a tank crew in occupied France to a cheeky American pilot conning his way into the RAF, it shows the incredible fortitude of its combatants against odds that were frequently absolutely overwhelming. You get the tiniest hint of a sense, from living through a variety of roles across several countries, of the scale of a conflict fought on multiple fronts by countless men, each with their own tragic and sometimes pitilessly brief story. Despite the intensity of its action, it’s a more sombre experience than the triumphal heroics that used to be standard issue in military first-person shooters.
Battlefield 1’s sobriety stands alone in the year’s treatment of interactive armed struggle.
Call Of Duty: Infinite Warfare (PS4, Xbox One, PC) sets its conflict in the future, safe in the knowledge that no memories are being trampled in its more gung-ho approach, which sees your hero fighting his way up from Earth to its planetary colonies in pursuit of rebels who are painted as utterly unsympathetic and totally evil. For VR headset-owning fans of its space missions there’s also a free single-level spin-off, Jackal Assault (PSVR, Oculus Rift, Vive), which gives you a disappointing turn in one of the game’s starfighters for a touch of flimsy-feeling virtual-reality space combat, the sense of speed and destruction somehow muted as you blow up oddly stick-like enemy fighters.
The last part of the war trifecta, Titanfall 2 (PS4, Xbox One, PC), sets itself in an even more distant future, in which humans fight in and alongside robotic, house-sized walking tanks called titans. The single-player campaign does a bang-up job of imbuing your enormous bipedal buddy with personality: a faltering attempt at returning your thumbs-up is a moment of particular poignancy, as it struggles to understand the complexity of human emotions. Not that you have much time for navel-gazing, with missions demanding the gamut of you and your giant robot’s powers. It may not have much to say about war but, of the three games, Titanfall 2’s single-player campaign is easily the most inventive, and its multiplayer turns out to be the most interesting, too; the rhythm of alternating between playing as a fragile human before taking to your hulking metal behemoth, adding a welcome twist to a genre that’s grown all too familiar.
This year’s pre-Christmas buildup wouldn’t be complete without new consumer durables, and following last month’s hugely compelling PlayStation VR headset, Sony has rolled out PlayStation 4 Pro (£349), a more powerful version of PS4 that outputs Ultra HD, letting owners of 4K TVs finally have something good to do with them. Although not all games get an upgrade, Skyrim: Special Edition, Hitman, Titanfall 2 and numerous others have already received a noticeable graphical enhancement, and those with PlayStation VR will find many of its games looking crisper and more solid. They’ll also find a delightful antidote to Christmas 2016’s pan-historical bloodletting in Tethered (PSVR), a real-time puzzle game made in Britain. In it, you help small, furry creatures build and defend villages constructed on beautiful islands floating in the sky, while enjoying the kind of pastoral charm only previously available in Nintendo’s Pikmin series. It’s trickier than it looks, and its offbeat style is typified by the fact that to heal your tiny charges after they’ve taken a beating, you build a pub rather than a hospital. Its message is clear: make beer, not war.
