Beyond The Wire puts you right in the middle of the Great War. Either lead or follow your own squad, as your work together to defend your land against enemies, artilleries, tanks and everything lethal enough to kill you. Beyond the Wire is a 50v50 PvP World War 1-based game with multiple maps. Creating one of the most happening ‘battlefields‘ in 2022, which sure will ring your ears when you go to sleep.
Developed by Redstone Interactive and published by Offworld Industries, Beyond the Wire made its way to Steam on August 31, 2022. Before releasing it went on multiple rounds of early access to better understand the player needs and the game’s performance with 100 players on a single map. After its official release, we took a deep dive into the game. Here’s how it went.
Go Beyond with Teamwork
Beyond the Wire is truly if not the first, but the best of its genre of games. Even compared to big AAA titles, the game outshines them in many aspects and fights for its spot to be on the top. Beyond the Wire puts players in an always active environment that closely compares to many war-based campaigns we play in real life. However, this time you and your team draft the plan on the go while facing threats that are doing the same. In short, I agree you need to be quick and make every shot count. But the real warfare is of the minds combined.
World War 1 didn’t have many automatic weapons and machinery invented to slaughter mankind. But enough to draw blood which can dye an ocean red. Beyond the Wire offers you many single-round rifles, revolvers, Mountable Rifles, and more. But you will be relying more on closed warfare with swords, daggers and bayonets. Make sure you’re grenadier is nearby because only he can bring the explosives to prevent a squad to ambush you. But never tread into the enemy territory without a medic available to prevent you from bleeding out.
Beyond the Wire will truly teach you how a squad works. It will teach you that no matter how good you are with your weapon, you need have people looking out for each other. Whether it is reconnaissance, or digging the holes and filling sandbags for covers. A squad needs to have every resource it can put together.
But what if you have an armed truck ready to move? It won’t bug without a driver. Similarly, your squad is not worth a bit if you don’t have a leader who knows the ground like no other. A squad leader has many responsibilities. This includes – Putting a rallying point, setting objectives, and most importantly being in command of your entire team with clear communication.
Go Beyond the Enemy Lines
While talking about clear communication sounds good on paper, Beyond the Wire makes it feel good as well. Having a proximity chat, accurate to the direction it’s coming from, brings a heightened level of immersion. If a player asks for a medic, you don’t need to find the name and scan each player. You start moving in the direction you hear it from.
This feature offers better input when you are being ambushed, sneaked upon or if you’re taking a heavy crossfire with immediate decisions to make.
The Squad Leader utilizes the Team Radio to give commands and the next steps to his platoon. This is how the team decides to defend or attack a position. This is often utilized more when the team is scattered and where more manpower is required to create a siege upon the enemy strongholds. While proximity and radio chat serves to be pivotal in the game, it is more important to watch out for each other.
The rifles may not take down an enemy with a single bullet. Hence, it is important that you are not engaging an enemy alone, or allowing your teammate to do so. Forge tactics, take your time before firing and make sure your chambers are loaded before peeking. You may fire and immediately switch covers and peek again. But this process cancels your reload process, and the fresh bullet is not present in the chamber.
There is too much to consider to make perfect teamwork into dream work. Each player needs to know what he is doing and make sure the ranks play it right. It will be impossible to defend against heavy artillery if you don’t have a cover. And a total disaster if you don’t have enough men alive defending the lines without a medic. Lastly, it is of high importance, that each role is played out correctly or everyone will be waiting for the next respawn wave, which will end up pushing the team back to the final stronghold.
But does it let you Go?
Summing everything up, Beyond the Wire at its core is a really great game. But when it comes to performance and actual playability. It takes a HEAVY beating. And we mean the HEAVY here.
The initial and the most critical problem here is the lack of servers and playerbase. We played the game from New Delhi, India. And the closest server I could get my hands on had a ping of 247 with 0 active players. During the entire day time, there were servers 1 or 2 servers with barely more than a dozen players.
After working till late, I decided to boot up the game at 3:30 in the night, I found a server with 290 pings but 99/100 concurrent players. This is where I spent my entire night till morning learning what the game has to offer, even if my melee hit registration was almost inexistent. Sadly, till today I could only find one or two servers offering this kind of playerbase that is mostly around Europe.
Another problem the game faces is with the performance. The game does not feel optimized enough for a smooth experience. But even after trying on multiple systems with different configurations, the stuttering and jaggedness always remained. The quality did change with higher settings, but an overall smooth 60 FPS setting was rare to find. Many times the game progressively lags so much, that it requires a restart.
A recent exploration of the early access reviews indicates that this issue only came out after the official release. This means the game still has the potential the bounce back with optimizations.
The progression system makes sense to allow players for being rewarded with time spent, but during the start, a lack of a tutorial system only makes it hard for the player to understand the ropes of the game. The game should also allow more types of rifles and attachments to further enable players to adapt their approach. It also makes no sense to have a blocked POV when you are DBNO. Since at that time you need to understand what is happening at your location to determine if giving up is better than waiting.
Verdict
Beyond the Wire is an extremely action-packed 50vs50 PvP multiplayer game. The WW1 setting truly makes the battlefield scarier with trenches, crumbled buildings and burnt forests. The game offers an exemplary communication and ranking system. This creates warfare of strategies over who has the better aim. The game however lacks a severe playerbase and servers around the globe. The release also has unoptimized graphics that doesn’t allow a pleasant or smooth experience while playing.
While we do have a heart for the game, we do recommend you to try the game and increase the playerbase to the glory it deserves. But if you’re on a budget, wait for the playerbase to revive and several patches to optimize the game.
Final Rating: Recommended