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World War II has been the backdrop for hundreds of PC games in the time since the Allies declared victory, but not all of them get it right. Stereotypes or absurd action setpieces leave historians shaking their heads, and at this point we've seen the same famous battled played out so many times. What would it look like to cobble together a game made from the best depictions of those moments, spread across years and genres?
These are our favorite representations of key World War II moments and battles. Like the games of our most historically accurate PC games, not all of them would pass muster at an academic conference. But they're all commendable for capturing some element of the conflict in a way that shows a reverent, compelling attention to detail.
World War 1 Games. Not only can you get started right away, but you can enjoy a full, free experience without sacrificing quality! Free games offer the same immersive worlds and challenging scenarios as paid games, all without the annoying price tag. Just choose any World War 1 game you like, download, install and enjoy free full version as long as you want! 1,175,547 » war games. Mud and Blood 2. Play as a squad leader in a dense World War 2 randomly generated battlefield. Try to hold your line of defense at all costs. Customize your squad with 14 types of soldiers, 9 weapons, 30 power ups, mines, barbwires, trenches and bunkers. 358,071 » war games. Art of War 2: Stalingrad Winters. Winter has now come to Stalingrad, but the siege continues. Can you purge the city? 61,398 » war games. Mud and Blood 2.3. Warfare 1917. Lead the British or German army through the trenches of Europe in this First World War strategy game. 728,609 » war games. Mud and Blood 2.6. Experience World War II as a squad leader in this newly updated, randomly generated war game. Supposed to be the war that ended all wars, WW1 (World War 1) as it became known, though referred to as the Great War at the time, saw 17 million killed (of which 7 million were civilians) and a further 20 million injured. WW1 lasted from 28th July 1914 until the Germans surrendered on 11th November 1918.
Best D-Day landing - Medal of Honor: Allied Assault
While Allied Assault’s graphics don’t hold up flawlessly today, it felt grippingly real in 2002. The developers tried to make us feel like we were in Saving Private Ryan, and they knocked it out of the park. I can still hear the final instructions before being dumped into the surf echo in my mind: “Head for cover and get to the shingle! I’ll see you on the beach!”
I was genuinely tense as the ramp to my transport lowered, putting me directly in the line of German machine gun fire. My heart raced as I watched my fellow soldiers drop like flies all around me. Finally reaching safety was pure euphoria. Many games have tried to recreate that feeling since, and none have truly succeeded in such a gut-wrenching fashion.
Best Battle of the Bulge - Call of Duty 1
It’s easy to forget Call of Duty began as a single-player focused World War II shooter that rose to prominence in an era when it was compared favorably by critics and fans to Medal of Honor and Battlefield. The most memorable mission from the original game (and perhaps in the whole series) was the capstone of the American campaign, “Festung Recogne”. It flips the pacing of Normandy on its head. Rather than a sense of dread at the carnage you know is to come, it lulls you into a false calm before the first wave of Germany’s most infamous counter-attack of the war takes you off-guard.
Infinity Ward did an excellent job of making the assault feel unexpected, and the fight to stabilize the situation frantic and challenging.
Best depiction of junior officers - Company of Heroes 2: Ardennes Assault
Best World War 1 Computer Games
Sticking to the Battle of the Bulge, I couldn’t complete this list without mentioning CoH2’s fantastic Ardennes Assault expansion. In addition to introducing very interesting dynamic campaign elements, it gave each of its distinct companies a beating heart—voiced officers who each represented an archetype of the types of people who got caught up in the war. The reactive end mission dialogue made me feel each victory and defeat ever more keenly. I’ll never forget Johnny Vastano lamenting the pointless loss of life after a mission where I’d played fast and loose with my boys to get the job done.
Best air combat - IL-2 Sturmovik series
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There’s a reason IL-2 is still a darling in the flight sim community all these years later. The meticulous modeling, both visually and mechanically, of the storied Soviet aircraft was enough to set it apart on its own. But it also dialed up the immersion by introducing mechanics like blackout and redout when experiencing extreme g-forces. While most flight sims are content to give you the most immersive experience of a robot flying a plane, not many go out of their way to remind you that you’re playing a flesh-and-blood human being.
Add to this some well-designed missions and wonderfully tense dogfights, and it’s hard to recommend any other game about flying a plane over war-torn Europe more highly.
Best strategic layer - Hearts of Iron IV
Not many World War II games get into how and why the Allies actually won. Unfortunately for the romantic depictions we’re used to, it wasn’t primarily because of the heroic sacrifices of a few gifted servicemen. It actually had a lot more to do with availability of resources and industrial capacity. These concepts underpin Hearts of Iron IV and challenge you to think about aspects of modern total warfare that most normally wouldn’t give a second thought to. Rather than making it across a beach, your objectives often involve securing key oil fields and developing your industrial heartland.
Best depiction of ground combat in the Pacific - Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm
The Red Orchestra series represents perhaps the best infantry-focused multiplayer shooters centered on the conflict, and Rising Storm in particular shines a light on the oft-overlooked Pacific theater. Like Allied Assault, it does a fantastic job of depicting the pressure of coming under attack from all sides. Battles play out amidst the chaos of mortar fire and shouted warnings. It's all the more impressive that Rising Storm accomplishes this using other players rather than scripted NPCs. The confusion and paranoia of jungle combat is tuned perfectly to create hectic, low-visibility firefights and allow for cunning ambushes.
Best high-level tactical experience - Steel Division: Normandy ‘44
Existing at a scale just above Company of Heroes but below Hearts of Iron, Steel Division excels at giving you a detailed and plausible sense of commanding combined arms resources to win large battles. Scouting and intelligence are emphasized, gaining air superiority can be decisive, and every weapon on every tank or infantryman models realistic range, accuracy, and penetration. It exists in a great sweet spot in terms of scope and scale to give you the total World War II experience (minus naval combat) in a single match.
One of the most difficult jobs I have as a history professor is reminding students that the First World War was a world war. I know. It seems obvious from the title. Nevertheless, here we are. The hardest students to convince of this fact are literature majors. You see, they’ve read Brittain, Graves, Hemingway, Owen, Remarque, Sassoon, and the Regeneration Trilogy. They “know” the war. Please, whatever you do, don’t try to tell them that most contemporaries viewed the war as a heroic struggle. World War One was a war about lost innocence and “lions led by donkeys.” And most of all, it was a war about the trenches of the Western Front.
I look forward to correcting student perceptions of this war, but I am also always on the lookout for anything that I can use to make that job easier: a book, a film, or a YouTube video. I never look to video games for help with this problem, but that may change with the recent announcement of Battlefield 1.
The reveal trailer for Battlefield 1 – which has now become the most liked trailer in YouTube history – was met with concern from game journalists who worried that this game will grossly distort and commercialize the hallowed history of the Great War. Yet this same trailer – filled with dubstep and hilariously explosive prop planes – left me hopeful.
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Games set in the First World War are few and far between – even as we currently mark the centenary of the war. What’s more, almost all First World War games are set along the Western Front and usually include only soldiers from Western Europe. In the trailer for Battlefield 1, however, we see glimpses of settings in other areas of the world featuring a diverse collection of soldiers. As a historian, these inclusions make me incredibly excited. The First World War was truly a global war – with campaigns fought in the Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And as the Battlefield 1 trailer implies, these campaigns often did not involve the static, trench warfare waged in France. Given these inclusions, Battlefield 1 – a profit driven, explosion-packed multiplayer shooter – has the potential to be the most historically accurate First World War game ever.
Why is it only now that we have the promise of a World War One game that actually addresses the global nature of the conflict? Cynically speaking, of course, we could note that as a multiplayer shooter Battlefield 1 needs to include other areas of fighting in order to have a diverse and lucrative collection of maps, vehicles and weapons. While I don’t discount that idea, I believe the traditional dominance of the Western Front in video games, and popular memory more generally, is the result of seeing the war through the lens of literature. As one historian put it, the First World War produced an overwhelming amount of “poignant disillusion” related to the Western Front. While this disillusion existed during the war, it did not come to dominate how we remember the conflict until the 1930s, when All Quiet on the Western Front and the war poetry of England’s Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon became the bedside reading for a world headed to yet another war.
The Second World War appeared to confirm the view of these writers that “the war to end all wars” was in fact a meaningless slaughter. This assessment of the war received greater popularity in the 1960s during the 50th anniversary of the conflict. The narrative of careless and clueless generals forcing their soldiers to early graves found an eager audience among those concerned with Vietnam, nuclear war, and tearing down old imperialist structures. It’s no coincidence that this era produced a number of famous anti-war films set in the First World War, including Paths of Glory and Oh! What A Lovely War.
While I would never question the truth of experience found in the writings of Remarque and others, it is important to contextualize their work. Though poignant, their writing represents but one of many contemporary views of the war. Most of the famous authors from this war served as junior officers, a group of men who suffered disproportionate casualties when compared with common soldiers. In Britain, for instance, only 12% of the total number of soldiers mobilized for the war died, yet of the total number of junior officers raised for the war the percentage killed was 17%. This figure led many war writers to argue that the causalities of the war represented a “lost generation,” but in fact population totals in many warring countries remained steady and quickly rebounded after the conflict, even with the postwar flu pandemic.
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For most soldiers, the war represented a costly, yet momentous struggle. The established narrative of the First World War would have you believe that these soldiers were brainwashed into fighting, but this discounts their own agency. Many of them fought because they were motivated by the ideologies of the day, including monarchism and imperialism. They believed that the war had meaning and that their service was heroic. For those who worry about what veterans would think of Battlefield 1’s gung-ho portrayal of the war, consider what they would think about their struggle being mocked in black comedies like Blackadder Goes Forth or the Benny Hill-esque chase sequences in Valiant Hearts.
This war without purpose led to the end of empires in Austria-Hungary, Germany, Russia, and Turkey. It also brought about the Russian Revolution, the emergence of America as a world power, and established the basis for modern politics in the Middle East. Indeed, the current civil war in Syria as well as the Arab-Israeli conflict can be traced back to the Sykes-Picot agreement signed in 1916. Most war memorials built during the 1920s were designed to celebrate triumph rather than to solemnly linger on tragedy. Many of these memorials included captured trophies from enemy forces such as artillery pieces and helmets. Armistice Day – now referred to as Remembrance Day – was treated as a day of celebration rather than dutiful commemoration.
Similarly, a focus on the literature from the Western Front obscures the role played by the rest of the world and non-white people in the struggle. The trailer for Battlefield 1 includes nods to the war in the Middle East as well as the Harlem Hellfighters. Yet these inclusions represent the tip of the iceberg. When I lecture on the First World War, for instance, I often avoid the Western Front altogether, and talk instead about Lettow-Vorbeck and Jan Smuts in East Africa or the violent means used by the French state to impress West Africans into the Senegalese Tirailleurs. When I do discuss the Western Front, I focus on the war behind the lines, remarking on the segregation of African and Indian troops as well as the French labor camps for conscripted workers from Southeast Asia.
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Of course, like many others, I too worry about how the final version of Battlefield 1 will depict the conflict. For example, as a historian of the British Empire, I am all too aware of the war’s meaning for Australia and New Zealand. But as a historian, I am also conscious of the fact that historical memory is a finite and precious object. Nothing remains in our collective memory without occasional reminders, even events as horrific as the First World War. In an ideal world, these reminders would be distributed by expert scholars presenting judicious and nuanced historical narratives. Yet writing as one of these scholars, I am only too aware of how little purchase my voice has in modern culture. Historians begging to build a memory for the First World War often cannot choose how that memory will be erected.
To give you a sense of what I mean by this, I’ll conclude with my own past failure along these lines. This time last year, I shopped around a pitch to several websites about the depiction of the First World War in video games. This article was designed to go over recent World War One games – including Sid Meier’s Ace Patrol, Valiant Hearts, and Verdun 1914-1918 – and discuss how their focus on the Western Front obscured other histories and memories of the Great War. I called this article “All Quiet on the Other Fronts.” Clever, right? Yet I couldn’t get a single website to bite, and I gave up.
I share this story not to show up editors or to encourage them to eat crow (though I know some good recipes if they’re interested) [Email me. –Ed]. Instead, I share it to emphasize the point that games like Battlefield 1, even if they include objectionable material, spark invaluable historical conversations. When I pitched my idea last year no one cared about the history of World War One. In the week after the announcement for Battlefield 1, however, we’ve been bombarded by a wave of hot takes from journalists come historians as well as intricate historical breakdowns of footage on YouTube. All of this caused by a trailer that lasts just over a minute! Imagine what will happen when the actual game comes out this fall!
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I am not just happy about this development because it will make my job as a lecturer easier. I’m happy because I believe talking about the war is important. Whether you see the war as a tragedy or triumph is inconsequential when it is often a matter of remembering the war or not. If that remembrance occurs within the guise of a big budget first person shooter, then so be it.