100v100 Shooter 'Over The Top: WWI' Playtest is Now Live, and We Tested it on the Steam Deck

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Flying Squirrel Entertainment, known for the creation of Mount & Blade mods, has just launched their latest playtest for third-person shooter Over The Top: WWI. The playtest is completely free and will run from 10 AM EST / 16:00 CET on December 4 to 4 AM EST / 10:00 CET on December 9. Players can join the fight on the game’s Steam page.

Over The Top: WWI features 100 v 100 multiplayer battles, as well as single-player taking place during the First World War, playing as either the Central Powers or the Triple Entente.

You can check out the playtest announcement trailer below:

The latest playtest has a host of features, such as destructible environments and airstrikes, with players and bots supported to ensure that there's always a full battlefield. You'll have your selection from a wide variety of weapons, including Bolt-Action Rifles, Revolvers, Flamethrowers, Machine Guns, and an assortment of melee weaponry. If being a foot soldier isn't your style, there are also 6 armored vehicles and 10 artilleries available in the game.

The dynamic terrain system across the game's 9 maps allows teams to dig trenches for protection, as well as naturally deforming due to explosives. And if that isn't enough for you, you can randomly generate a map, or you can create your own maps using the in-game map editor.

How Does it Perform on the Steam Deck?

Sadly, it's not a great start. Over The Top: WWI currently has no controller support, so you'll need to make up your own controller layout for the game. The blessing here is that the default WASD template gets most of the controls right for you, and there aren't too many controls, so you should be able to make one fairly quickly. There also seems to be an issue with the menu displaying on 16:10 resolutions, so some of the artwork is cut off, luckily this doesn't affect the in-game UI, and the game does at least allow 16:10 resolutions, so there are no black borders.

Performance is a mixed bag here. 60 FPS is completely out of the question, which is a shame for a competitive shooter like this. Actual performance varies depending on 2 factors; What map you're playing on, and how many bots are present in the match. The bots increase the CPU load quite a lot, and if there are over 50 bots in a match, the Steam Deck can easily drop below 30 FPS. But in my experience, online matches tended to have only around 20-30 bots, and my frame rate was around 32-36 FPS most of the time.

Going into a single-player match and putting in 199 bots (100 on one side and 99 on the other) resulted in an almost constant sub-20 FPS framerate. Hopefully, you'd never encounter such an extreme situation in an online match, which is the main way to play the game.

Admittedly at these lowest settings, the game does look pretty bad, but the frame rate does fall under the realm of playability. I would say the main issue you'll face is the controls, if you manage to get a control layout working that you like, then I would say Over The Top: WWI is playable on the Steam Deck.

You can go ahead and sign up for the playtest now, and acceptance into it should be immediate, so you can check it out for yourself if you're interested.

This one is a fairly slow-paced and somewhat tactical shooter. Given the fact that the devs have worked on Mount & Blade before, it shouldn't surprise you that it's important to aim your shots and choose your targets carefully, there is friendly fire, and you can just kill a friend in one shot if you aren't paying attention to their uniform. It's not hugely based on reaction times, which is probably fortunate given the 30 FPS we have to play at on Steam Deck.

Will you be trying out Over The Top: WWI this week? Let us know in the comments below!

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