Meet Bulkhead's Battalion 1944, the indie Call of Duty: WWII

pcgamesinsider.biz:

Bulkhead Interactive has been about for a few years now.

The team met while at university during the mid-00s game crash. Not many studios were hiring, so they decided to go it alone.

“We were young at the time and were like: 'Let's go for part-time jobs and try and make our own indie game and see if it works out and see if we can make our own route into the games industry’,” creative producer Howard Philpott says.

“We tried it, we went for six months and made a terrible game that sold okay called Pneuma: Breath of Life. It went okay and had a dedicated fanbase. Later on, we made our second game, which was The Turing Test. That was also published by Square Enix. From there we were able to work on Batallion as well as getting money via Kickstarter. Eventually, we were able to make our dream game.”

Now the team is working on its most ambitious yet, Battalion 1944, a World War Two shooter with a different approach to many shooters.

“The initial idea was at the time there were no WW2 shooters,” Philpott explains.

“We also knew that the big companies would never go for the type of shooter that we wanted to make. That means no killstreaks, no perks, just back to basics gameplay. Call of Duty 2 had these amazing fight sequences with one shot rifles, but we wanted to combine that with COD 4 - the fast-paced pro-mod style of gameplay. People are really responding to it, the fans who used to play those games. They're coming up to us and saying they love it. It's good for us.”

Though there were no World war Two shooters when the team first started out, Activision has thrown its hat into the ring with…. Call of Duty: WWII. But Bulkhead isn’t that worried about the blockbuster series.

“We knew in advance that it was going to happen,