DUST vs. Gear Krieg
So this week I want to cover something I get asked about on occasion; why I seem to hate on Weird War 2 stuff but seem to love DUST and Gear Krieg, and which of the two I like more.
To answer the first question; it’s mostly because I feel the whole Weird War 2 thing is a bit overdone at this point, and it’s starting to fall into its own series of very obnoxious cliches(some of which even DUST isn’t exempt from). It mostly stems from having gone through the Maryland public education system where every single year in history class they’d spend at least a month wanking off to how awesome the United States was during the second World War and would shrug off pretty much any history that occurred before 1939; including the first World War which, without, the second wouldn’t have been possible. Even in world history my junior year of high school we hardly touched on the Great War but spent weeks upon weeks talking about WW2 like every event in history before it was completely worthless and would never matter. So yes I’m a bit bitter towards the second world war for hogging all the damn spotlight both in schools and on the History Channel.
As for Weird War 2 it’s starting to follow a pattern I think. We in the gaming world continue to just automatically go “Nazis = everything evil” and churn out the same thing over and over. Why do the Nazis always seem to be trying to raise armies of zombies, or discover magic in Weird War 2 settings? I get that, for the most part, the Nazis were some crazy evil bastards who did a lot of crazy evil stuff, but have we become so lazy that when we say “Nazi science” it automatically leads to zombies? What makes you think nobody else would be invested in crazy super-science stuff if you’re going that route?
Now the “Nazi super-science” thing is something that even DUST can’t escape from, which is a shame because I generally like DUST. I greatly enjoyed the boardgame and I love the art and the overall feel of the setting, and I still eagerly await DUST Warfare to maybe someday eventually possibly grace us with its presence. Unfortunately there are some things that DUST does fall flat on, and the “Nazi super-science” is one of them. The axis forces have super-science Gorillas and zombies, and that always bugged the hell out of me.
I’m a bit more hesitant to label Gear Krieg as Weird War 2 because it doesn’t feel like most others, and even Dream Pod 9(the folks who made the original game) refer to it as Dieselpunk. It’s more pulpy and less silly. Does it still have the cool walking tank thing like DUST? Yep, but it has no zombies or Nazi occultists or whatever crazy crap they constantly try and jam down our throats. Gear Krieg is much more grounded, and it sprinkles in the cool stuff like the aforementioned walkers with more subtlety and realism than just going “lol super-science.”
Now to answer the second question of which I like more between DUST and Gear Krieg; I’d have to tip my hat towards Gear Krieg for the reasons in my previous paragraph. Gear Krieg is more down to Earth and feels like silly and off the walls than DUST, and that’s nice to me. It truly feels like it’s basically just WW2 with some better technology(walkers, jet fighters more commonplace, etc.) and doesn’t rely on the cheesy old gimmick of “Nazi super-science” to get you to start booing and hissing. It’s a game that doesn’t make you feel like a sociopath dick for wanting to play the Axis forces because it’s not so blatantly sitting here going “Nazis are evil so they use all these things we might think are evil because they are all evil baby killing cannibals who like to pee on dead bodies” or whatever. Gear Krieg is about the basic troopers on the ground doing what they do, and it doesn’t touch on the sociopolitical stuff that was going on with the higher ups of the German government at the time and how they were really the big crazy evil people while most of the ground troops were just pissed because the Germans got a raw deal at the end of the Great War but history class wouldn’t tell you that because then they’d have to acknowledge that something happened between the American Civil War and the Nazi invasion of Poland and it’s so much easier to just say “they were dicks.”
