War has long since been inspiration for gaming titles but usually, they focus on World War II. That’s not the case with the recently released ‘Over The Top: WWI’, which takes you to the battlefields of World War I and promises an experience like no other. The game arrives after developer Flying Squirrel Entertainment has run many community-drive playtests during the game’s successful beta phase. With a huge online mode and an appealing single player mode, ‘Over The Top: WWI’ had lofty ambitions but can it realise its potential?
With 12 historically inspired maps from the Western Front of WWI to play through – and more said to be on the way – ‘Over The Top: WWI’ promises to deliver a ton of content and options to players. You get to choose and customise your character, before you get into the meat of the game and this kind of customisation has become fairly standard now in games. Once that’s sorted, you work your way through a training camp of sorts. This gives you time to get to grips with the control system, experiment with the different weapons on offer and get a feel for the game before you dive in. For me, this is where the initial frustrations started to show as it’s not particularly clear what you need to do or where you need to go. That resulted in a fair amount of time just wandering aimlessly in the hope that I’d stumble upon what I needed to do.
Eventually, I got into my first battle and I was impressed by how the locations have been realised. Up to 20 players (or bots, depending on your mode) compete against each other on the battlefield, and it’s fair to say that the game really does capture the chaos of war. You have to keep your wits about you at all times as enemies pop up all over the place, and if you let your guard down, you’ll find yourself dead very quickly. The playing fields are really impressive and I liked that anything that happens during the battle stays, for example you can dig trenches that you can keep coming back to and damage from the warfare doesn’t just automatically vanish.
Alongside the variety of weapons on offer, you can choose the class of your solider and that in terms determines what vehicles you get to use throughout the game. If you’ve ever fancied navigating a battlefield in a biplane, well this game will let you do that. The variety is one of the key components of the game to keep you coming back and should help with its longevity.
The most frustrating aspect of ‘Over The Top: WWI’ is the control system, which is frequently glitchy and sluggish. In battle you have to act quick but the controls here don’t often make that possible, and that’s a huge problem. There are plenty of lags as you try to navigate around the battlefield, and these often don’t give you much opportunity to engage with the other soldiers in any meaningful way. Add to that the poor hit detection, and no aspect of the combat system is very good.
‘Over The Top: WWI’ has huge potential but it’s not currently as smooth a gaming experience as it should be. With a flawed control system, the game struggles to deliver on its promise. Perhaps a lot of the issues will be ironed out in the coming weeks and months but at the time of reviewing the game, ‘Over The Top: WWI’ was pretty underwhelming. It’s a shame because the game looks fantastic and I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun once it’s fine-tuned.
Publisher: GG Publishing Developer: Flying Squirrel Entertainment Reviewed on: Steam (PC) Release date: 6th March 2026 Find out more about ‘Over The Top: WW1’ now
