Darkest Hour is a mod for Red Orchestra, which I talked about last week. So, in the continuing trend of picking incredibly obscure games, Darkest Hour is a mod of a game which was originally a mod. And it’s absolutely fantastic. Now, when I say that I love Red Orchestra, and have probably played a good ten hours of it (at least), I really love Darkest Hour. I think that I’ve currently clocked in about 20 hours of it and I still can’t stop playing it. All that you need to know really, is that it’s Red Orchestra but on the Western Front. Think Saving Private Ryan, or Band of Brothers.
This post is going to be dedicated to a certain mission, as I think it’s probably the best mission I’ve ever played on anything ever. Sure, you can play Omaha beach, Pegasus Bridge and Pointe Du-Hoc, but the real challenge is in Hill 400. Those who are familiar with Call of Duty 2 may remember it as one of the American missions, where you hold the hill against huge odds at the end. For those who don’t know, the Americans have to clear a town at the foot of the hill, then circle around the hill, knocking out enemy positions, before launching a final assault on the heavy fortifications. Here’s a map:
My tale shall be told in three parts, three different games which I played on the map, each with approximately 49 other people (25 a side).
My first experience of this map was as an American. We took about half an hour to clear Bergstien (the town you see there in the top left of the map). Trust me, that isn’t a bad time to clear that thing out in. You can’t even cross the street without getting sniped or machine-gunned. Then we hit Strong Point 1. And stalled, badly. Nothing we tried could get us across this field:
That block you can see just above the smoke? That’s the bunker. In front of it are a large amount of dragon’s teeth (the German tank traps) and there’s a large forest behind it (as you can see). To the left of the bunker is a trench complex, not that we knew that. We tried sprinting across the field, which worked for a time until we reached the teeth, where we just got shot from all sides. We tried crawling across (see: the screenshot) but that didn’t work at all. We tried flanking from the left, but the lack of cover meant it frequently ended in a very quick death. And so the next half an hour played out. Us trying to get a foothold in the bunker, the Germans easily holding us off.
My next game was as a German, joining about halfway through a game, just as the Americans reached Strong Point 1. And wow was it a different experience. As an American, you just assume that the Germans have it easy, but I can tell you it isn’t. Make one wrong move, stick your head out for one second, and you’re dead. What isn’t clear as the Americans is that you’re all aiming at the same area, so as soon as a German moves, about ten people start firing. To be fair, the American team was a lot better than the one I played with, some of them even managed to reach the bunker several times, and we couldn’t go anywhere near the trench complex without getting friendly with Mr. Bullet.
My third game was as an American again, and I was with them from the start. And I have to say, we kicked ass. We blazed through the town in fifteen minutes, me supporting (see: camping) with an MG. And we hit the Strong Point. And beat it. After only ten minutes, we’d breached the bunker, with one of our guys loudly proclaiming over voice-chat, “I made it! I’m inside the bunker! For God’s sake stop shooting at me!” And we pushed on, taking the second Strong Point in five minutes flat.
Strong Point 3 proved more difficult. The Germans had mortars zeroed in on our position, and the trees were completely swarming with both sides, making it difficult to distinguish who to shoot and who to leave alone. But we prevailed and pushed on, thanks in a large part to some highly organised guys with microphones.
More fighting, more ambushes, more dying. Bloody hell this game is brutal, a single mortar round sending bodies and limbs flying into the air, screams ringing out in the forests. Moving too quickly would result in death. Moving too slowly would result in death. Not moving would result in death. To illustrate my point, here are some before and after images:
And after:
And so the tempo changed, with the Allies alternating between cautious advances and stupidly heroic charges, smashing the German defences to pieces. And then we were through, we’d reached the top of the hill. The Germans were on the run, without a safe place to hide.
And then, with fifteen minutes still left on the clock, those words. Those six glorious words. After 45 minutes we’d done it, we’d done the impossible.
The Allied Forces Win The Battle! Hell yes we did.
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