Review | Foxhole - I'm Doing My Part
Out of every war game I’ve ever played, none have represented the frank mortality of battle like Foxhole. Produced and developed by Siege Camp, this ‘pseudo-world-war’ sim shooter consists of a top-down third-person experience where you play as a soldier in a full-on MMO war scenario, where everything from clothes to bullets to tanks is managed by the players themselves. This experience truly gripped me and gave me a whole new experience as a player where I felt integral at every turn.
OK, but what if you could also dress up as John McClane or the Donnie Darko Bunny in the simulation of one of history’s great tragedies?
You deploy on the starter island, where you can customise your gender and your skin tone. There’s little to no actual character customisation outside of this, other than the determination of your class via the clothes you wear in-game. I felt this was actually a positive aspect of the game; my issue with a lot of MMO’s is that character customisation is often dictated by microtransaction models, instead of actual game design choices. Take War Thunder for example - try to stay immersed in that game when someone flies past in a bright pink spitfire. Knowing what class a character is just by their costume is also a plus, as it is handy in the battlefield setting. Foxhole avoids over-customisation, and instead uses a prestige system of ‘ranks’ that players can achieve by getting commendations from other players. I loved this. The guy who got the most commendations on my team wasn't Rambo with a hundred kills, it was the poor bugger we sent forwards with a few grenades to take out an AA gun we’d been stuck behind for hours.
You guys go ahead, I’ll just, eeerrrrrr, gotta check the shells and, um, make sure the barracks are tidy.
At its core, Foxhole is a very social game. Players can arrange themselves into clans. At every point in its gameplay there is some level of player communication; be that voice chat on the front lines or using the ping system on the map to upvote a particular course of action. At one point a comrade of mine popped a ping on the map asking for more mortar shells to be delivered to our position, and an hour or so later a little convoy of trucks turned up with every explosive under the sun. There is a very specific joy in this game that comes with its collaboration aspect. For me, it adds a certain something that other multiplayer war games lack - that feeling of being a part of something bigger kept me playing. I don’t care about killstreaks, for the most part. I once got a double headshot in Splitgate which was cool for a hot second but I get my kicks from some solid co-op, and Foxhole is built on that.
War, much like Xbox Live circa 2008, is hell.
Something I think this game’s closest comparison, Planetside 2, lacked was this background collaborative play. In Planetside 2, all you had to do to gain resources was capture certain areas of the map, so everyone picked up a gun and went out to join the fight. Sure, random gunplay is fun, but after a while it starts to feel a little empty. Knowing that my gun and my bullets were built by someone on the backline, ferried to the front by a brave trucker and delivered and organised by a logistics player gives the fight a depth that few other games have. It makes you feel like you’re part of something more.
The game gives this fantastic experience of being a part of a community, but still manages to be a pretty sombre representation of war. I was sitting in a trenchline feeling very secure before someone in the opposing army decided it was time to drop several kilos of mortar shells on my head. Goodbye private Jamie, hello strawberry jam. This isn't a hyper-masculine war fantasy like most other shooters and it isn’t a detached view of colonel in a strategy game. Foxhole is a multiplayer game that feels personal and one where I really felt fragile. One wrong step and I was toast - in fact, I think the average survival time of my poor little soldier would be barely enough to make toast.
The game also has a healthy modding community… If the green lasers and zombies didn’t give it away.
One time I felt less like a human punching bag and more like an asset to the cause was when I played as a logistics player - that translates to truck driver, more or less. That might sound boring, but it’s actually surprisingly rewarding. Imagine playing Eurotruck Simulator with actual consequences. As a logistics player, you get a few hundred players screaming at you for everything under the sun - from bandages to tank shells. It's a weaponised version of an UberEats drive during the lunch rush. The difference here is that people actually appreciate the work you are doing. I got a commendation (an in-game reward) just for spawning on the backlines and getting in a truck. The driving mechanics are very simple, but alas, so am I. The top-down view means that you only have a few seconds to see oncoming vehicles or obstacles so you are constantly forced to pay attention to what you are doing. I once tabbed out for a second to send a Discord message and ended up crashing into another logistics guy. His name was Burt Reynolds. Poor guy must have had enough of that in Saints Row 3.
I believe this is what military experts refer to as a quote “Clusterf[REDACTED]ck.
Logistics is a long process, but there are few games that actually have the backbone of social mechanics and communication to make the process as worthwhile as it was in Foxhole. It’s a part of the game that people enjoy and it adds to its community feel. There is a natural pacing and anxiety to it as well. I turned a corner and caught sight of an enemy saboteur. The next five minutes of driving were grippingly scary as I waited for a landmine to take me out, and only felt safe again when I pulled into a friendly town. It's a refined part of the game that's not thrown in as an afterthought, and as someone who likes these deep mechanics in games, I really appreciated the care put into it.
Traffic, huh?
Another feature that makes this game feel very real is the length of time it takes for events to occur. I spent a while in a central area of the map, which consisted of a small town and a bridge. For hours my team and the opposing team played a bloody game of tug of war over this small territory as part of the games massive ongoing war, retreating and counter-attacking. I would die and run back to the fight and find us pushed deep into enemy territory, only to be forced back into familiar trenches by the sudden appearance of an anti-infantry gun none of us spotted behind a rock. This back and forth is fueled by logistics in the background, and for the most part, I felt like I was more or less a meatshield while we waited for artillery to turn up or hunkered down because we ran out of ammo or bandages. Foxhole does a fantastic job of portraying what a real WW1/WW2 era battle must be like, as no amount of skill can stop the inevitable grind of the war machine. If you’re lucky you can pick off one or two people before taking an anti-tank shell to the face. Eat that, Call of Duty.
I think what marks Foxhole apart from its peers is its community focus. You, as a player, are a part of something far bigger than what you can do alone, just like how real armies operate. Instead of the pretend heroism of most FPS war games, Foxhole focuses on the mass toll war takes on people. I do, however, feel I am losing a little bit of the experience playing in shorter stretches. War is a long thing, especially in the format that Foxhole uses. Each time you jump into the game you get a readout about how many people have died on both sides in the war - for me, this was hitting six figures on both sides. While this is a great way to hammer home the toll that war takes on people, the sheer runtime of the battles makes playing a full one quite prohibitive.
To really experience Foxhole past a few disconnected battles, you have to get involved in the community. It's in this way that Foxhole represents war as war. Foxhole breeds a comradery unrivalled in any game I’ve played before, and the sense of shared responsibility and success should be applauded as a victory in community game mechanics. It does all this while showing war for the bloody, painful mess that it is. Foxhole proves that realism does not need to be sacrificed for rewarding mechanics, and creates a sense of passion and enjoyment miles behind the barrels of any gun.
