World in Conflict

The Good
I really did...

Yes there is something about seeing the statue of liberty and the Soviet hammer and sickle on the front of the box with nuclear explosions on the back.

The story to the game (as if we really care with an RTS) is that the Soviet Union did not fall in 1991, rather got organized and launched a surprise attack on the United States by invading US ports while transporting military hardware disguised as cargo vessels. A sudden and surprise attack on American soil by Soviet forces was covered (rather ridiculously) in a movie known as, "Red Dawn", but instead of having to rely on high school kids to defend America, we have the US military.

The graphics in the game are probably the best of any RTS, and will likely remain that way for a long time to come. The camera angle and positions is an entirely new and breakthrough approach. For those of you familiar with Virtus Walkthrough Pro, it's something like that perspective but with better graphics. You can even go down to street level in first person and enter some buildings and walk alongside troops and armor. While it was possible to do this in Company of Heroes, the big difference here is that the game can be played from this perspective, where CoH could not. You could force a top down view, but it's actually harder to play the game that way, and the maps can be very large which further makes that perspective impractical.

There are a wide variety of off the map attacks and strikes as well. From mortar attacks, artillery, and chemical agents or nuclear strikes, to air dropping in tanks, infantry, or other supplies, a large part of the game is deciding on how to spend your "resources" (well, the game doesn't really have resources, you earn points that can be used for off map strikes by killing enemies) on which type of attack will be most effective against a certain type of enemy.

The sounds are decent, nothing new, but the nuclear explosions are the best and most realistic I've seen. The action is hot and fast moving, especially when you play online and have an 8 vs. 8 match with everyone dropping in units, firing artillery at hard targets, or conducting operations based on their roles.

In multiplayer, you can decide the type of role you wish to play. Support has access to artillery and anti-aircraft equipment. Air has helicopters, infantry is self-explanatory. What's more is that each individual unit typically has a special attack and defense which can be used and has a cooldown timer. Tanks have a smoke screen making them hard to hit, Bradley vehicles have a TOW missile which is good against other vehicles, infantry can sprint, etc.

Lastly, the multiplay is smooth, easy to connect to, responsive, and well executed. Rare in a brand spanking new release.

The Bad
Shock and awe! Have you ever heard the term, "if you can't win 'em with words, baffle 'em with bullshit?". That would describe this game, for me at least. There is no doubt that the graphics, camera angles, and level of intensity as 16 people lay down airstrikes and artillery barrages is unmatched. But when we take a look at the actually gameplay, a lot is left to be desired...

For one, there are no bases and no resources per se. You have an unlimited number of units to call upon, although limited in the number/type you can have on the battlefield at once. This means that you can never be knocked out of the fight unless all of your territories are captured or the game timer runs out and the side with the most points wins. I am just as strong towards the end of the game with your army controlling the map as I was at the beginning of the game.

The combat is less reliant on tactics, and more reliant on the type of role you and your partners are playing. For example, everything is basically set up as a rock/paper/scissors type thing. Choppers destroy tanks, tanks destroy anti-aircraft, anti-aircraft destroys choppers. With rare exception, if you don't have your rock vs. their scissors, you will lose. If your team focused at the beginning of the match on air defense, and they went for ground offense with tanks, you lose. Too often the game is determined before it starts.

Units do not move quickly enough, so once someone decides to attack your units, it's pointless to try to move them out of harms way. They'll never be able to get away. I even chase down choppers with my AA and can stay in range as I shoot them down while they run. Poor. To make matters worse, you can see enemy units approaching, long before they are even in firing range. There are no sneak attacks, everything is out in the open, it's just a spam fest (spam is a term sometimes used in video gaming to describe random chaos).

What's more, there is zero defense against off target bombardment. If you can be seen, you can be hit, and you can be seen almost everywhere on the map.

Micromanagement is possible, but not rewarded. Sure, infantry moves slowly but I can move them into transports to get them into the action quicker right? But that's a moot point. The time it takes to move the infantry into and out of transports, I could have just changed my drop zone to where I wanted to be and drop more units there.

On the third multiplayer game I ever played, I took the very top spot in a 16 person game, over people that were ranked very high. What did I do? Just run units into the dogpile of enemy units at the center of the map. I didn't use strategy, tactics, or any kind of thinking. I just clicked on units to attack at the center.

The campaign? There is only one, and its hindered by all of the voice acting. You spend more time listening to reality TV type drama between officers bitching about this and that than you do actually playing the campaign. There is even a button to skip dialogue, the designers must have known it was that cumbersome. I like a little story with my action, but the campaign is silly and ridiculous.

The worst mistake with this game? All sides be it NATO, US, or USSR are pretty much identical. A terrible error! In reality, there are stark differences between US, European, and Soviet battle strategies, and the equipment varies greatly as a result of this, but not in WiC. All sides have access to the same arsenal that has the same strengths and weaknesses that do the same things. The only difference is the name of the unit and its graphic. How could they make all of the sides identical!?

The Bottom Line
I wanted to like this game. The concept and the graphics along with the unique yet playable camera perspectives was a cut above. The rest however, is pure rubbish that is random spam at best.

The Good
It's pretty. Cutscene characters have movable mouths, fingers, pockets, all good stuff. It's more realistic than most RTS games, where after a set time suddenly a unit just pops out of nowhere in front of a structure, though the units do a similar thing when entering and exiting buildings and vehicles. It's got a more set timeline, and gives you the date and time of each mission, and nothing happens in the game that would normally take years (I’m looking at you, 1503 A.D.). Vehicles are good at backing up; I know some games will have tanks turn around if you move them back just a few feet, which is no fun. When you save missions, it shows what mission you saved it in, and when you saved it, which helps keep saves orderly. You're not alone on the battlefield, like the many one-on-one RTS games, and your allies actually help a little. And finally, all your unit icons are in a neat little row at the bottom of the screen.

The Bad
As I was playing the demo, I made a long list.

If you want to attack enemies that garrisoned a building (which they do by some of them finding the door, then apparently the rest of them blink through the walls), the only way to dislodge them is to destroy the building. C'mon! So you're telling me you can't just send in a couple of soldiers and clear it out, you need to blow up the building? And not only that, the soldiers are so stupid that even if the building's about to collapse, they still don't automatically exit the building, and instead let the ceiling crash down and everyone dies.

You can't really tell when a vehicle has infantry in it without actually clicking on the vehicle. Even then, you can only find out what type of infantry it is by looking through the infantry bar or having them get out. Further, there's not much to tell you whether or not you're selecting a unit (when you select units, the boarder around their icons change from light beige to slightly darker beige), and actually getting infantry to exit buildings is a huge hassle, and only sometimes works.

At certain positions, if you hold it for a while (meaning you HAVE to have some units inside a tiny circle), fortifications start being built, by ghosts of all things, since you can't actually see anyone building it or anywhere the material could come from, which takes a bite out of its so-called realism. But if your unit moves so much as a foot out of that circle, suddenly the fortification building counter resets, and moving back in requires waiting the full time. That doesn't make a whole lot of sense; in truth, the whole fortification process makes no sense.

The repair vehicles don't auto-repair close units, which is something that nearly every review mentions. But more importantly, I think, the repair unit might as well be using magic to repair units. To get something repaired, you order it to repair, it gets close, and...well, nothing really happens. The health bar of the unit just magically, slowly fills back up. No sparks, no guy getting out to fix it, no movement whatsoever of the repair vehicle, it just sits there. And since units really show no difference whether they're new, damaged, or close to being destroyed, and have no change in appearance or change in effectiveness, repair seems to be one of the most dull processes in the game, which is saying a lot.

The autosave only works in the very beginning of a mission. The game doesn't bother to save between mini-cutscenes, and because of this, the first time I played I got to nearly the end of the mission, then failed (in the only way it’s possible to fail: just being overwhelmed by Russians. It’s never fancier than that. I guess the Soviet army’s standards are pretty low for what's considered "tactics"). So, I later restarted, and tried again, this time manually saving multiple times. But each time I saved it took quite a while for it to finish, and even longer to load.

As for the storyline, that was what interested me to begin with. When I first heard of the storyline, that the USSR was invading the United States, I immediately felt indignation. I consider Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 as the best game ever made, and I was a bit angry at the implicit implication that the storyline is new and original, and from just a look at the screenshots I already had a feeling its creators focused more on graphics than making a good game. But after playing the demo, I realized that there was absolutely no possibility of this game will surpass Red Alert 2, at least in quality, but if people read user reviews of it instead of “professional” reviews, I doubt it will be surpassed in sales either. PC Gamer reviewed it in the November 2007 issue, and despite a nearly endless list of things wrong with the game, still gave it a 93 percent rating, because it had “Amazing Graphics; fast paced gameplay; class-based RTS multiplayer”. If you want amazing graphics, go to The Louvre. The game play is sort of fast paced, but paradoxically boring, complicated, and the difficulty doesn’t come from a challenging AI; it comes from trying to control your units while simultaneously using General Powers (er, “Support”, as the game calls it). And I couldn’t give a wooden nickel about its multiplayer. Anyway, the only thing this shares with Red Alert 2 is the general storyline of a Soviet invasion of America. But instead of the fun, almost goofy while at the same time chilling storyline of RA2, this games storyline is stupid, slow, and moody. Why didn’t the Soviet Union peacefully collapse like it did in real life? I don’t think they say. Why doesn’t one side just use ICBMs on the other? I mean, the USSR was about to collapse anyway so the Soviets have nothing to use. And Soviets can’t get to America’s heartland fast enough to destroy all America’s missiles, and if America ever feels it’s hopeless they’ve got nothing to lose by launching a massive nuclear strike on the invasion forces and/or the Soviet homeland. The delivery method’s as bad as or worse than the storyline. The game has a weird intro with dramatic music and little explanation, then a bleak and bland video battlefield clip, then the trite, worn out “father-son conflict”, and stylized paintings at the beginning of missions. The tutorial’s drill guy, Master Sergeant Watson, acts like he’ll piss himself with glee if you just turn the camera to the side. I swear, that guy could be impressed by an ant carrying a potato chip. Then there’s the colonel who’s supposed to be badass, which you can tell because he’s too high and mighty to actually wear a helmet, and the meek tank commander who doesn’t want to die. What is this, a computer game or a soap opera?

I think the game is in some ways a spiritual successor to Command and Conquer: Generals. Just like Generals, it overemphasizes its pretty graphics, has a nonsensical storyline, and its Support option is almost exactly like Generals’ “General Power” option, except in World in Conflict they recharge over time. However, for all its faults, Generals was actually fun. That’s something I can’t say for this game. Plus Generals had a lot of things that this one doesn’t have, like building assaults, sensible repairs, and more of a focus on ground combat, whereas in World in Conflict you’re often left trying to both control ground units and use your Support options (which are pretty useless against most non-static targets, but you need to use them anyway), adding a level of unwanted busyness to the game. Finally, you’d think that airlifting units in would be a good thing, and be more realistic than the standard RTS method of having units pop out of nowhere after a short wait. But World in Conflict’s method is nearly as nonsensical. EVERYTHING, and I mean everything is airdropped in. It’s not possible for any units, whether Soviet or American, to simply come drive or walk to the map. I can just imagine this war playing out in real life: “Hey, there’s a battle going on 5 miles up the road.” “Want to drive to it?” “No, let’s drive 25 miles to an airport and get airdropped on the battlefield!” It may not be as ridiculous as units suddenly appearing outside of buildings, but it sure comes close.

The Bottom Line
Beautifully rendered crap is still crap. But not only does this game have an extreme overemphasis on pretty graphics, (which seems to be a trend in video gaming these days anyway) it’s just not very fun. If you have any inkling that you might actually like this game, try out the demo. If that doesn’t disillusion you, then by all means go to Wal-Mart and buy it for more than $40 bucks (at the time of writing this). Me, I wouldn’t buy this game if it was in the $3 bargain bin. If you want to play a fun game, then play pretty much any game but this one.

The Good
The graphics are simply awesome for an RTS. This certainly isn't your mama's RTS (Dune 2 or Starcraft)... It is great for plug-n-play noob style. If you have a lan party, this game would be great. No experience necessary to blow stuff up. No resource gathering... none of that. Even FPS guys would love this. Unfortunately I didn't get to play this game online or through a LAN... so I saw problems with its gameplay a lot more clearly.

The Bad
There isn't necessarily one big reason the game is over-rated, but a combination of many small idiosyncrasies. Just about everything could have been improved, everything except the cut-scenes.

In short:

Why do you have to repair by hand? Couldn't the repair truck just repair everything in the area? If you're in a war with the Soviets, a war that uses every modern piece of warfare at its disposal, you are going to take lots of damage! Isn't that common sense? This isn't Cossacks or Age of Empires where battles are slow and sparse, where armies slowly march into each other. If that were the case you could take the time to repair things by hand... but this is modern warfare, with all sorts of gunships, tanks, and infantry surrounding you from all sides, all continuously bombing the shit out of your men.

Where is the strategy in this strategy game? Just select which troops you want paratrooper-ed in, then move them towards an enemy and watch "the spectacle" as that drunk captain in "The Good The Bad The Ugly" once said.. just a big giant fireworks display courtesy the Hind D in the sky. It's something difficult for me to explain so I'll just say it like this...

...Do you know the game Minesweeper? Now imagine minesweeper, but instead of buttons to press on and mark with numbers, there are tanks that you mark [for death], and instead of mines that blow up in your face, there are casualties, and instead of a reset button (the smiley face) there is a troops-deployment menu. Now imagine Minesweeper with lots of glitzy explosions. Would you want to play Minesweeper with explosions? Well yes, so would I. But would that make it a solid all-around game worthy of such nominations as Game of the Year? Now you see what I mean..

The Bottom Line
Flash over substance. Hype at its finest.. just go look at official reviews and even "player reviews" at crap sites like Gamespot or IGN. It's ALMOST all 9's and 10's. Why? Either everyone is brainwashed by the media, or these massive companies hire and pay people to go onto those lame sites and write user reviews praising the products. That is why I am happy to have Mobygames! If you look closely at gamespot.com there are a few reader reviews that speak the truth.. their scores range anywhere from 1-6. If you have to have this game, download the demo before you buy! And please write a full review on here after you play.