Isonzo’s Ascent event puts an even more vertical twist on the mountainous WWI shooter

thesixthaxis.com:

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