The Lost Battalion: All Out Warfare

My honest first reaction to The Lost Battalion: All Out Warfare was one of mild bewilderment. WWI is a setting that almost nobody handles well in games, and the ones that do - think Valiant Hearts and its patient, grief-soaked puzzle design - use the era's particular horror as raw material for something meaningful. This game takes a sharply different road: a rudimentary side-scrolling shooter where a cartoonishly mustachioed American soldier from Alabama runs left and right through eight arcade levels, shooting German foot soldiers and machine gunners for points. That is essentially the entire loop. The structure gives you two modes - Up and Over and Arcade - and they play so similarly that calling them distinct modes is generous. You pick from three heroes, customize a Battlecard loadout, and then scroll through static screens trying not to die. Foot soldiers wander aimlessly until they collide with you and just keep pushing, dealing contact damage. Machine gunners sit fixed and fire insta-kill rounds in straight horizontal lines. The controls are laggy enough that reacting to either enemy type feels arbitrary rather than skillful. There are also collision glitches: step in the wrong spot and the game drops you into invisible mud for an instant death, no warning, no visual cue. It happens mid-run with no logic attached to it. Score-chasing under those conditions is less arcade-hard and more just unpredictable. The art style lands somewhere between hand-doodled class notebook and unfinished prototype. Animations are minimal throughout - walk cycles, bullet travel, blood splatter all share the same baseline roughness. Bullets travel only horizontally regardless of firing angle, which would feel intentional in a retro-styled game but here reads as an oversight. The dialogue, delivered in voice lines by your Alabama soldier, cycles through a handful of quips that clash awkwardly with the WWI Western Front setting the game claims as its backdrop. There is craft ambition visible here - someone cared enough to add voice lines and a Battlecard system and multiple modes - but none of it coheres into something that feels finished or intentional. For the niche of players who genuinely collect trading cards and want something idle to run in the background during a bundle clear, that use case exists. The game does support Steam Trading Cards, the sessions are short (average playtime sits around four and a half hours across all recorded players), and the price floor is low. But as an actual game experience - one where mechanics, pacing, and moment-to-moment decisions are supposed to reward the player - it does not deliver anything that free browser-based shooters from the same era could not match or exceed. The 50-50 Steam split reflects a community genuinely divided between people playing it as a card-farming curiosity and those who came in expecting a coherent WWI shooter.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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