As a Build Engine fan and a history nerd, I was pleasantly surprised when I initially found out about this game. The premise is simple, yet fairly unique, and certainly held a lot of potential – using a great piece of FPS tech like Ken Silverman’s Build Engine (of Duke Nukem 3D and Blood fame) to simulate massive historical battles like those of the Second World War’s D-Day Landings.
This had a lot of potential in my mind, and I enjoyed what I saw (conceptually) of how your player character is but one man among armies of dozens of on-screen combatants in the traditionally solo affair that is a Build Engine shooter, or most retro shooters period. The whole American perspective on the Allied Normandy landings is absolutely nothing new when in comes to storytelling in games these days, let alone media as a whole, but still, WWII GI could have been a fun little concept-tech demo.
The problem arises from the many technical faults this game has, which, despite my best efforts to push through – between the dated controls, a really un-optimised framerate issue, and insane difficulty spikes, at the end of the day, I just can’t suggest you buy or try to play this one. There are some fan-made solutions to some of these problems floating around online – perhaps try running your files through a different Build emulator or VM instead of the native DoSBox the Steam version uses and savescum your way through the campaign if you really want to, but as it stands, this is a pretty poor representation of a Build shooter, especially when compared to the likes of Shadow Warrior ’97 Redux and Blood: Fresh Supply which are currently up on the Steam Store and run fantastically.
Can’t honestly recommend. War is hell.
