Gallipoli

Firing a ten-round rifle until it's empty takes sixteen seconds. Reloading it takes ten. If you're hit in a non-vital area, you must first stop the bleeding, which takes eight seconds, and then regain full health, another eight. If you've run yourself ragged on the way there, it takes twenty seconds to catch your breath. Sixty-two seconds in total for a single cycle of combat, and in sixteen of those you're actually pulling the trigger. The rest of the time you're standing there waiting for your character to finish doing something. Immersive, sure. Exciting, absolutely. But how much actual gameplay is there between all the animations?

I timed it myself so as not to have to settle for mere adjectives. Between each rifle shot, there's a one-and-a-half-second movement. The light machine gun reloads in five seconds, or four if you've levelled up the reload perk. If you sprint whilst reloading, the reload is interrupted - without the game asking - and you have to start again. No single figure is actually outrageous, as a one-and-a-half-second reload is on a par with other bolt-action weapons used in the genre, and ten seconds to load two magazines into a Lee-Enfield is historically accurate rather than unfair. The problem is that they pile up...

Reloading your weapon is something you do often in {Gallipoli}, and it takes time!

And you don't get very far whilst they're happening. You can walk - but only walk - and if you run away, the animation is interrupted and you have to start from scratch. I use auto-sprint, which means this disruption happens automatically as soon as I try to move at any reasonable speed. So, if an advancing enemy appears in the middle of a reload, the choice is between walking slowly and unarmed or wasting the seconds you've already invested, so the outcome is often the same.

I'll be open about where I stand, as it colours everything above. I like movement and I love responsive aiming. I want there to be a direct link between what I do with my hand and what happens on the screen, and for the skill to be mine to develop. That's exactly the direction Infinity Ward is heading with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, where bloom is removed and where the weapons designer states outright the player shouldn't lose firefights to an unknown element beyond their control, but should live and die by their own decisions and their own skill level.

Gallipoli is heading in the opposite direction. Layer upon layer of animations, a weapon sway that makes the sight wander like a slithering anaconda in your hands, and a random factor when firing blindly around a corner that means you have no idea where the bullet is going. My first few hours largely consisted of reaching for a paper bag, taking ten deep breaths, and consciously refraining from losing my cool.

But then something happened, sometime after I'd stopped trying to play Gallipoli like a modern shooter. It started to get interesting. This game gets up close and personal, with knives, clubs, and bayonets. It's gritty and when you're right up close, everything's swaying, it turns grey, and then it turns red, while grenades fly past your ears, artillery roars in the distance, and you pray you won't be turned into mincemeat when it strikes next. It's the sort of chaos you can actually imagine from 1915.

Lying in a trench and watching fifteen men storm towards you, where you manage three shots. Then you're lying at the bottom of the trench, bandaging yourself with trembling hands, and reloading whilst hoping no one is looking down. It's unsettling in a way few shooters dare to be, and it's clearly intentional.

The authenticity lies in the details, too. The sling-bell catapult I built and fired eleven shots with, without reloading, is no curiosity but a historical improvisation. At Gallipoli, the Allies ran out of shells and made their own from empty jam jars packed with scrap metal and nails. They simply took what they had to solve the problem at hand, and the game models this scarcity as a mechanic. What it spares you is the tragedy. Of the approximately 213,000 British casualties at Gallipoli, around 145,000 were due to disease rather than enemy fire. Dysentery, typhoid fever, and a lack of clean water took more soldiers out of action than bullets did. That's not something you can turn into a shooter game, and that's probably just as well.

The only proper PVP evening I've had was a press test with 46 players. Nobody said a word but it didn't matter. I chose the scout class and built the sling in the first sector, fired off my eleven shots at the machine-gun emplacement that was mowing down my teammates, and then followed the group forward. Once we reached the objective, all hell broke loose. I had a single-shot rifle and everyone else was running about with pistols, which were the wrong tools in the wrong place. I lit a scout flare, did my bit, and got shot in the back by a camper.

A giant slingshot with iron projectiles is a useful tool for holding back the enemy whilst advancing.

In the next sector, I made my way deep into enemy territory, found the spade in my kit, and built a spawn beacon near the objective. Suddenly, I had a whole group behind me. We still didn't say a word, but we moved forward efficiently based on pings, and when I marked enemies with my scope, my teammates could see them even when they were behind cover. I took turns shooting and providing intelligence and as the final battle went into overtime, it was as an officer - with the ability to zone out the defenders using artillery and air strikes - that I actually contributed to the victory. Sixth place on the leaderboard. Woohoo.

That's where Gallipoli comes into its own. The ping system, the scout binoculars, the spades used to build spawn points and machine-gun emplacements. The tools are designed so that a team can function without a single person saying a word, and that's rare in this genre. Most games that require this level of coordination also require voice chat to work at all and Gallipoli manages without it. But it's definitely more fun with it.

But there's a downside, and it affects certain roles more severely than others. I spent a spell as a scout, marking targets for a machine-gunner who mowed down everything I pointed at. The team gained ground but I got nothing for it on the scoreboard. So I gave it up and switched to chasing kills instead.

To be fair, it's not a widespread flaw. If you play as a light machine-gunner or a sniper, your contribution is immediately visible and you're rewarded for exactly what you do. It's the support roles that fall between the cracks, and the scout most of all, as its entire value lies in information that someone else converts into hits. It stings all the more because the match economy actually counts that contribution. "Momentum", which is the game's own term and is simply put, "tickets", is the attackers' pool of revives, and it starts at 125. A defender killed gives ten back; a captured objective, twenty-five. So, sniping at the machine gunner directly fed into the team's ability to keep attacking. The game took that into account and yet it just never showed it to me.

At launch, there is one game mode and five maps. Anzac Cove and "V" Beach are set on the peninsula that gave the game its name, while Kut and Ctesiphon are in Mesopotamia, and Suez takes place in Egypt under a night sky. The attackers push forward through sectors in sequence where each sector has two objectives: the headquarters must be captured, whilst the other is optional but provides a forward spawn point and access to the sector's strategic assets. Simply holding the point isn't enough either; it must also be secured by placing explosives or constructing various structures. The result is that a point can be captured and lost several times before it is secured, and it's during these rounds the game is at its best.

You don't just choose a class but also a squad, and the squad determines what you have access to. There is one Officer per team but there are one or two Snipers. There is one light machine gun per team, while privates and engineers are available to all. If you want a specialist role, you must choose the right group; you can't just click "quick select". Furthermore, the teams are not mirror images of each other. The shop description promises ten historical classes, but the Ottoman list stops at nine, as the light machine gun is only available to the British. In return, the Ottomans have two slots for heavy machine guns, compared to the British's one. This is historically plausible, as the Ottoman forces built their fire support around heavy Maxim machine guns, and the game consequently gives them the Maxim M1909 as opposed to the British Vickers.

Class and weapon perks in Gallipoli. A 75 per cent reduction in suppression awaits at class level 20, and everything can then be reset via prestige.

Every weapon and every class is levelled up to level 20 and can then be prestige-levelled, with the difference being that the class also requires a completed challenge. The challenges are role-specific; for example, the officer must kill fifty enemies using their support weapons, so it's about doing your job rather than chasing numbers. Weapons are levelled separately per faction, which means the same weapon type must be grinded from scratch if you switch sides. The developers state there are 150 weapons to level up, a figure that requires some explanation: rifles with different sights count as separate weapons, whilst bayonet and rifle grenade variants share progression with the base weapon. In the menu, I counted thirty-nine distinct entries.

But the figures that matter most are found in the class tree. Class perks are tiered in three stages, and the jumps are significant. The machine-gunner starts with thirty-four per cent less suppression and ends up well above that. The rank unlocks "Rifle Drill", which quite simply reduces weapon recoil, and this was already in place by class level 8. In other words, the mechanic I've devoted half of this text to describing as the game's biggest friction is something the game gradually removes again, via the most accessible class in the entire line-up. Gallipoli hasn't lowered its skill ceiling. It has shifted it from reflexes to hours of play.

No deadzone setting in a modern controller-based shooting game is just rubbish!

And then there's dead zone. Gallipoli doesn't let you adjust it. I've measured how much joystick movement is required before the camera moves at all, and it comes to around nineteen per cent. So almost a fifth of the joystick's movement does absolutely nothing. To counter the recoil of an automatic weapon, you need to be at a maximum of four per cent, and most serious players using a controller set it as close to zero as their stick will allow.

The consequence is clear. Recoil control on machine guns, whether light or heavy, is practically impossible. If you use a rifle instead, you'll find yourself up against the game's significant weapon sway with a controller that refuses to register the very micro-adjustments it requires. You can either make large movements or none at all. BlackMill has, admittedly, given some thought to the controller, as the menu includes both aim dampening and aim snapping, but these are aids of the sort you'd find in single-player games, and they solve a different problem. Aim assist helps you locate an enemy, but it does nothing for recoil control, which requires precise counter-movement regardless of where the target is. Aim dampening, on the other hand, risks working against you, as it slows down the very input you're trying to use to counter the recoil. They've handed out crutches instead of laying the floor.

The control menu offers four sensitivity settings, plus invert, look acceleration, look smoothing, aim braking, aim snapping, and nine different switch options. There isn't a single dead zone setting. Gallipoli is marketed as a cross-play game where fifty players face off on the same servers regardless of platform. This is true in the sense that everyone fits into the same lobby. It is not true in any other sense. Until this is rectified - either by significantly reducing the dead zone or by putting the setting in the player's hands - I cannot recommend Gallipoli to anyone who plays with a controller.

Being a machine-gunner is one of the game's greatest pleasures.

A word on the circumstances, as they affect everything you've just read. My time playing against real opponents has been limited, for the simple reason the game hadn't been released yet. Most of my hours have been spent playing against bots, and that's been a conscious choice: I wanted to understand the progression system and how the game feels in the late game, once weapons and class perks have started to unlock. That's a different matter from how the game is actually played, and bots are perfectly adequate for that. They also fill public matches, so that even a half-empty server will still give you a match.

The rating, however, is based on evenings spent playing against other people. In those sessions, Gallipoli is fun, and the sluggishness matters less than you might think, as it's the same for everyone. Everyone reloads at the same slow pace. Everyone bleeds for the same length of time. Everyone stands there watching the same animation. This symmetry makes the sluggishness fair, and fair sluggishness is something entirely different from frustration. It's only when input comes into the picture that the symmetry is broken.

Gallipoli has been crafted with care, with a clear historical grounding, and a design philosophy that holds together from the jam-jar bombs to the suppression mechanics. The co-op tools work better than in most games in the genre, and for anyone who wants trench warfare that feels heavy, intense, and dangerous, there's a real experience here. But there's a single game mode, five maps, and a leaderboard that rewards the wrong things. There's a progression long enough to feel like a second job and a game that measures its reload times against reality, that matches the Ottoman's Maxim machine guns and the British Vickers because that's how it was, and that includes jam-jar bombs because ammunition actually ran out, has missed out on the single most fundamental setting in a modern control menu: The authenticity is meticulous, the input system is not.

A player who buys Gallipoli for PS5 or Xbox on launch day will encounter a shooter where a fifth of the joystick's movement does nothing, without being able to do anything about it. No one should have to put up with that. If you're patient, play with a mouse and keyboard, and have friends to play with, as this is a good deal. If you play with a controller: wait until it's fixed.