World in Conflict

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.