World in Conflict

Remember when you could check a screenshot and know what type of game it belonged to? First person shooters would inevitably have a wacking great weapon model front and centre. Role playing games would have walls of text somewhere on screen. And strategy games would be loaded down with indistinct and daggy blobs of visual detail.

Not so anymore. We have role playing games that resemble first person shooters. We have first person shooters which look like freakin real life. And we finally have strategy games which look good enough for everyday punters to play.

The challenge is to drag mainstream punters to not run like the wind when you start talking about micromanagement, hero units and build orders. Nobody has yet cracked this formula yet, and the failure of World in Conflict to do so is about the only concrete criticism (however unfair) we can level at the game. So sadly, it'll be existing gamers like you and I who sample the excellence more than Joe Average. This is a shame, as World in Conflict is the archetypal Game That Deserves A Wider Audience.

It all starts in 1988, but not the one we remember. Sure, we still have the crap music of that age, but instead of the USSR crumbling into a chaotic mess of Chechen mafia dons, corrupt public officials and decaying satellite states, our Kremlin brothers decided to go to war when a plan to stick up the UN for cash fails. The Doomsday Clock finally strikes midnight, and the Yanks and the Reds get their pummies on. The Soviets get on the front foot by hitting Europe and the US. Go red team! You get involved in battling the sneaky Russians from their initial foothold in Seattle, and prevent them wreaking all kinds of Vodka-fuelled havoc.

Tom Clancy's mate (they wrote Red Storm Rising together), noted author, military game specialist and man about town Larry Bond cooked up this premise, so it does retain a certain lustre lacking from games that fling you on a random planet and tell you to start extracting ore. You get the full story fig - the dramatic cut scenes, the burden of command, and a chance to see "what if" modern battle between two superpowers. It's obvious that time has been taken here. But at the end of the day, sweet storyline aside, it's how the game plays that matters most.

Many have touted this game as playing like a first person shooter. Dunno whether that bears closer inspection, but the camera control certainly gives you a similar feel. Keys for direction, mouse for aim. So easy a child could do it. If you're a child who plays Counter-strike, that is. What is seriously cool is that this is all about deploying units to take control points. It's an approach increasingly popular with progressive strategy game makers, and there's no argument that this implementation of it is top flight.

So how does play typically unfold in World in Conflict? You'll have a limited currency to spend on troops, vehicles and greater, "fun" stuff, you get an objective, you deploy, then it's in your hands. Grab resource points to call in reinforcements to top up your forces - assuming you've taken losses - and continue on your merry way to your objective. No wood chopping. No mining.

The way the game looks isn't shabby either. If you're playing it on low detail, you're missing the point. Boost that sucker's detail to 11 on the dial and enjoy visuals as good as most first person shooters, and arguably better effects to boot. The sternest test of any game engine is to render cutscenes using the in-game engine - WiC manages to deliver a pretty decent level of cinematic realism on this front.

You get real locations here - at least passable facsimiles of recognisable places - and a pretty well deformable level of terrain for you to reduce to smouldering ashes. The variety of environments is as expansive the US itself - as well as Europe and Russian locales. You'll bop through urban centres, forests, snow - even some beachside island action. Life's hard when the free world is at stake.

Even the ambient elements haven't been neglected - each of the units has a life of its own and dedicated animation keeps the whole thing ticking along. World in Conflict's, er, world is never a static one.

This lusciousness extracts a price out of your long suffering PC hardware. And the longer it's been suffering, the more you will be too if you're one of the crowd who likes to play with everything maxed. Our not-that-shabby test PC spec: 2GB RAM, Dual Core Pentium 2.2, and ATI HD 2900 card still copped plenty of slowdown when we juiced up the action. Dropping video settings down immediately fixed the issue - although particularly intense firefights took a toll - but we suspect the CPU is the bottleneck here. All that math, you see.

Bottom line, World in Conflict is worth your dollar, RTS fans. It's modern (ish) combat with the kind of solid storyline this genre has been crying out for. The visuals are without parallel, and the overall experience is hard to fault. It's early days yet for multiplayer, but the beta impressions we've collected thus far indicate that Massive is dedicated to supporting this direction strongly as well.

Best RTS of all time? Hard question to answer. Company of Heroes and this are two formidable contenders in the last year or so. Rather than argue about that point, consider this one: there's few enough quality RTS releases in the average year you have no excuse for not picking this up.