Classified: France '44

Classified: France '44 was provided by Team17 for review. Thank you!

This game was tested with a Steam Deck LCD. OLED testing is coming soon.

Classified: France '44 is an XCOM-like strategy game set during World War 2. You command a group of allied soldiers from various countries to aid the French Resistance and try to cause as much disruption as possible so the D-Day landings are a success. The game will end in different ways depending on how successful you are with the limited time you have.

You can also do side missions, known as "Special Ops," which are one-off scenarios crafted to give you a specific experience. You can even create your own Special Ops missions or download community-made ones, so that's a bit of fun for those so inclined.

It's an interesting concept, encouraging players to try multiple playthroughs to achieve better outcomes each time. I didn't opt for the higher difficulty option as I'm not great at these tactical strategy games, but even the middle difficulty caused me to fail missions when I made an egregious mistake.

Stealth is a huge factor in Classified: France '44. You are almost always outnumbered in missions, so going in all guns blazing is a surefire way to lose your team. Instead, you are encouraged to remove as many enemies as possible through stealth-like melee kills without alerting other soldiers nearby in most missions.

In addition to health, each character, including enemies, has a "morale" meter. Every time a soldier is shot at, their morale decreases. If it's below 50%, they will become "suppressed" and receive a 50% penalty for their action points. If their morale is depleted, they become "broken" and can't take any action at all next turn. There are actions that you can take to improve morale, however.

This ties back to being as stealthy as possible. If you are a squad of four and suddenly 10 enemies are alerted to you, the sheer amount of fire heading your way will likely deplete your squad's morale in a single turn, quickly leading into a death spiral with the constant enemy fire keeping your squad's morale low. It's frustrating but accurate to how the situation would go.

Your troops aren't magically better than the enemies, and you must use strategy and tactics to keep the upper hand. If you lose the element of surprise early on, it's very easy to lose your squad unless you are positioned well to take cover from enemy fire.

Aside from that, combat is very similar to XCOM. You have a list of abilities along the bottom of the screen, such as firing your weapon, a melee attack, a grenade, and often some kind of support ability to heal or improve an ally's morale. Choosing to attack an enemy will give you a percentage chance to hit, a chance to critical hit, and the respective damage you might do.

The game even adopts a different "cinematic" camera angle when you attack on occasion, just like XCOM. You still get that satisfying moment when your shot hits or you manage to pull off that critical hit you needed to kill an enemy in one blow.

Several different types of enemies are introduced as you play throughout the game. Some resist stealth takedowns, forcing you to alert the enemy if you wish to kill them, adding additional strategy components to each mission. Some enemies behave like the player's troops, where they can be "downed" rather than immediately killed and revived after a few turns. You'll need to keep an eye on all the different enemy types and remember their strengths so you can play tactically.

Story-wise, I was a little conflicted. The game tries to portray a realistic depiction of the French Resistance forces during the end of World War 2, even using ethnic slurs for the Germans commonly used by the Allies. But at the same time, the game does like to use witty one-liners. I have no idea how soldiers would have spoken back then, but it does seem strange to let out a "humorous" one-liner as you stealthily cut someone's neck.

It tries to tackle a heavy subject matter, and the gameplay and art style of the game are serious and tactical. Still, the voice-acting can be a little stilted, and every time a character speaks in a scripted way, and not just battle chatter, they just seem so nonchalant about the whole thing, like the war is a bit of fun with "About time I got to blow something up" and "I think I'm going to like it here." The latter, I feel like no one said in France during World War 2. It makes the game feel a bit "Hollywood."

Ultimately, I do quite enjoy Classified: France '44. The missions have a decent variety and design, giving you a chance to shine but punished if you make mistakes. The decisions extend beyond combat, too. When presented with gaining a new squad member, you often have to choose which squad member you take, with the other being lost. Likewise, when your soldiers level up, or you gain new equipment, you will have to pick the right skills and equipment for them that best suit your style of play.

Translating a game like XCOM into a World War 2 scenario, Classified: France '44 does a pretty good job of capturing the sense of being outnumbered and outgunned, which would indeed be the case. Emphasis is put on outplaying the enemy, and you are rewarded for doing so.

Classified: France '44 - Steam Deck Performance

Note: You need to use Proton Experimental to play the game. Using the default Proton causes severe performance issues when the camera is moved.

I had some issues with the default controller layout that Steam selected for me, so I would make sure you double-check that you have the "Gamepad with Joystick Trackpad" template selected and applied as your controller layout.

Aside from that, the game gets things right. The controls work fine with the right layout selected, the game supports 16:10 aspect ratio resolution, including the Deck's native 1280x800, and most of the text is readable. However, I did find the text for accuracy, and the text for AP remaining on the character portraits at the bottom left difficult to read on the Steam Deck, and there are no scaling options.

The game does have some flexibility performance-wise. Therefore, I can offer two presets for today: one focused on graphical quality and the other, my recommended preset, which sacrifices graphical quality for extra battery life.

Recommended Settings - 30 FPS

For my recommended settings, you should set SteamOS's FPS lock to 30 FPS / 60 Hz and set a TDP Limit of 7W.

We will sacrifice graphical quality for battery life, so in the in-game settings, we will set the quality to "Very Low," disable V-Sync, disable Anti-Aliasing, and disable Motion Blur. We will also enable FSR and set the Render Scale to 75%. Blood and Gore and FSR Sharpness can be adjusted to your preference.

With these settings, the game generally runs at 30 FPS. We do drop frames when the AI is taking turns or when we initiate an action, but the frame drops are fairly momentary, and given the fact that the game is turn-based, it doesn't affect playability whatsoever. It's fairly difficult to eliminate the frame drops, as there are times when the game is CPU-hungry, so in the end, I decided it was best to just accept the frame drops and have a low TDP limit rather than increase the TDP limit just to make the drops slightly less noticeable.

The low TDP limit means we see a power draw that ranges from 11W to around 14W. The game becomes surprisingly easy on the battery, so it wouldn't be unusual to get 3 hours of battery life with these settings, perhaps up to 4 hours on the Steam Deck OLED.

Honestly, the lower graphics settings are barely noticeable to me. The main time I notice the lower graphical quality is if the game uses a cinematic camera for action. Then, it becomes apparent that the textures are quite degraded compared to higher-quality settings.

Temperatures tended to stay in the 65-70C range, so not too hot at all.

Quality Settings - 30 FPS

If you need that extra visual fidelity, you can push things further and increase your graphics settings, but this will cost you some battery life.

Here, you should set your FPS lock in SteamOS to 30 FPS / 60 Hz again, but this time set a TDP Limit of 11W.

Then, in the in-game settings, we'll set the quality to "Very High," disable V-Sync, set Anti-Aliasing to FXAA, disable Motion Blur, keep FSR off, and set the Render Scale to 100%. Blood and Gore can be adjusted to your preference.

Performance with these settings is very similar to the recommended settings above. We will still experience some frame drops during AI turns when we give our troops actions, but the experience is perfectly playable and smooth when observing the map and making decisions.

The power draw is quite a bit higher, generally around 16-18W, but it can go up to 20W in intensive areas. I expect around 2 hours of battery life on a Steam Deck LCD and about 2.5 hours on the Steam Deck OLED.

Temperatures increase slightly, mostly within the 70-75C range, so the Steam Deck doesn't get overly hot again. This is likely because the game tends to have bursts of intensity and then calms down when players are making decisions, giving the Deck time to cool.

Accessibility:

There aren't any accessibility options in Classified: France '44 besides enabling "Extra Subtitles," which shows subtitles for all dialogue in the game. Most of the game's voiced lines have subtitles always enabled. Sadly, there's no option for UI Scaling as the game could use a 10-20% boost in UI scale to make certain elements more visible on the Steam Deck.

Conclusion:

Classified: France '44 achieves what it sets out to do. It aims to bring a story to life of the French Resistance fighting against Nazi occupiers, I'm not entirely sure it portrays things quite how they were, but the basics are there. The gameplay that accompanies the story is solid.

I believe there are plans to expand the game with DLC, so it will be interesting to see if periods earlier in World War 2 are covered, such as the beginning of the French Resistance. The developers confirmed they would never do DLC to allow you to play on the Axis side.

If you're after a game that follows the premise of XCOM but with a few little twists of its own and is set in a slightly more grounded setting, then Classified: France '44 could be the game for you. The game requires genuine planning and tactics and should keep any tactical strategy buff entertained for hours.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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