Climbing to a mountain’s peak is an arduous journey at the best of times, but fighting to reach and claim a summit in the midsts of WWI’s Battles of the Isonzo? It’s something else entirely. BlackMill Games’ exploration of Alpine warfare has taken a new turn with a time limited ‘Ascent’ event for their latest WWI game, Isonzo.
It’s more than a decade since BlackMill’s WWI series first went public with the Early Access release of Verdun, and they’ve continually iterated upon their concept across three games in the years since. From Verdun to Tannenberg and most recently Isonzo, each game has a different core concept that aims to capture the key differences between each theatre of war. On the Western Front of Verdun, the stalemate of trench warfare saw sides taking turns to attack and defend the shifting (or unshifting) lines. The Eastern Front in Tannenberg brought the Manoeuvre game mode that was a more freeform battle for sectors, much closer to Conquest in the Battlefield series. Isonzo’s war in the Italian Alps throws Battlefield’s Rush mode into the melting pot of the Offensive game mode, with one team relentlessly attacking layers of defensive positions until they win or run out of reinforcements.
Talking about BlackMill’s games in terms of Battlefield is rather reductive, when outside of the general scale and underlying game mode format, the tone is thoroughly different. Isonzo has certainly simplified and lessened some of the more specialised elements in favour of more straightforward squads and class types, but there’s still a world of difference between this WWI series and Battlefield 1’s more arcade shooter thrills. In particular it’s felt with the weaponry, and there’s the tense and taught nature of using the basic manual loading rifles of the day, but then having single hit kills for pretty much any shot that lands.
Inspired by the Twelve Battles of the Isonzo, the maps and chains of battles are overwhelmingly mountainous, and that provides its own distinct flavour to the action. Whether it’s the lower steppes of the mountain ranges that are lush and verdant with grass alongside the rocky outcroppings, or the highest peaks of a mountain, there’s still some great variety to be found through the game’s maps, and trying to attack up hill with defenders shooting down at you is thoroughly evocative.
And it’s this element that the limited time event ‘Ascent’ really leans into. From 10th to 24th April, this special twist on the regular Offensive mode, making it all about the battle to capture the peak of the Marmolada mountain map. This follows on the from Christmas Truce and the Wolf Truce from Verdun and Tannenberg.
The twist in Ascent? It’s climbing soldiers and falling rocks. The Italian climbers can scale the cliff faces to try and reach higher points, with placing pitons and rope helping those following in your wake (which might be you if you die). Meanwhile, the Austo-Hungarian defenders can naturally try to shoot down at you from their vantage point, but they can also grab rocks from a pile and try to fling them down at the climbing Italians, which thanks to physics bouncing rocks around, could potentially catch climbers from unexpected angles.
It makes for a complete change of pace, with the attackers having to go slow and steady as they climb, hoping they don’t catch a boulder or bullet on the way. Thankfully, there’s several staging points where you can capture and create a spawn point, wresting control of a ledge from the defenders. It builds up to a climactic battle for a control point at the summit, with a couple of small huts and a condensed and potentially very chaotic battle.
The main impediment to this mode is really the player counts. On console at least there’s often only enough players to mostly fill one servers, maybe two on a weekend, and now that the early novelty has worn off, it’s easier to sink into the multi-map chain of an Offensive mode server with players carrying over from map to map, instead of joining an Ascent server partway through. And if there’s not enough players or an imbalance for long enough from the start of the match – this mode doesn’t feature bot support – Ascent can become a bit of a foregone conclusion. It might have been better to add this map into a chain with the main Marmolada map, to get that same continuity of an extended play session.
As a time limited curio and a diversion from the main Offensive mode, The Ascent captures another distinctive moment from history and, for me at least, a great opportunity to explore what Isonzo as a whole has to offer.
