What would have happened if during the height of the Cold War in the 80’s the Russians had decided to invade America. With our forces spread thin around the globe fighting other battles, would we have been able to protect our own soil? That question is asked and answered in World in Conflict, the latest RTS game from Massive Entertainment, the creators of the Ground Control series.
From the first mission of WiC you can tell this game is going to have A LOT of explosions in it. With the Russians choosing Seattle as their landing zone, and all hell breaking loose in the city, it’s your job to try to salvage what you can. Before you know it highways are collapsing and the Seattle Dome is being turned into rubble. You’re character, Lieutenant Parker, is set in charge of small units of infantry, tanks, artillery and air craft. What sets WiC apart from other RTS titles is there is the way you add units to your army. You gain the ability to airdrop units in and call in fire support by killing other units and surviving. Amass enough resource points, choose your drop location, and units and bring in the reinforcements. Amass enough Victory Points and you’ll be able to call in air strikes, artillery and even laser guided missiles. There’s no resource gathering, no base building, no worrying about unit upgrades. This lets you concentrate on one thing: blowing up Russians.
And you will blow up A LOT of Russians. One mission in particular you are asked to hold a highway overpass from an oncoming army of Russian tanks. Armed with unlimited fire support, that means big frickin’ artillery guns, you will see one of the most impressive display of smoke and explosions in a video game to date. Not only do the explosions look good, but they sound amazing too. I highly recommend cranking the speakers and sub for this game. Your windows will rattle, and your cat will run and hide under the sofa.
The missions start off fairly easy, but the game does a good job of adding more and more abilities as the missions go on. Difficulty definitely ramps up in the later missions as the objectives become a bit less forgiving, even throwing a time element into effect. In between missions you’ll be greeted with some graphic novel style art and a voice over by the man himself, Alec Baldwin. The core strategy of the game comes in choosing which units to drop in to accomplish your goals. There are so many units at your disposal that each objective can have numerous ways of being accomplished. Need to take a strong point in town? Load up the surrounding hills with artillery and scout the area with choppers. Don’t feel like attacking from afar? Drop in some heavy tanks and go for the blitzkrieg. Or perhaps you can just shove a laser guided missile up their bottle of vodka. Most units have limited special attacks to even further deepen the strategy involved and there’s also an incentive for units to survive and not simply be cannon fodder. Your units will rank up causing them to gain extra health and have deadlier attacks.
Ok, enough of this jibber jabber. Lets talk about the purdy graphics. And this game does indeed have some purdy graphics. You’ve never had so much control in an RTS before as to the view and position of the camera. You can zoom WAY out getting a look at the entire battlefield, or zoom all the way and literally be at street level with your units watching the firefights take place. The detail on units are amazing at close range, and the audio is equally as impressive. I would have loved to see a dedicated “battle cam” button when selecting a unit to get a great perspective on battles. The explosions are gorgeous, with deformed landscapes and big puffy clouds of smoke to follow. Trails from artillery and missiles cover the sky and cause massive damage as they hit buildings and other objects, all of which aredestructible. The interface itself is clean, and not overly big. All buttons have tooltips even though it’s fairly obvious what they do. I never felt like I was looking for a command and couldn’t find it.
Not only is World in Conflict a solid single player experience, but the online experience has even more meat to it. You can really see the developers want to bring in as many people into the online modes as possible, as evidence by including a 10 day free trial in the box to give to a friend. After creating a Massive account, you’ll be able to have friends lists, instant chats, and even see stats of how people are doing. There’s clan support, tournaments and a medal system similar to Battlefield 2 and the ability to save and watch replays of matches. The replay tool is incredibly cool, and you can really get some great angles of the action similar to what we’ve seen in the trailers released for the game. It’s incredibly easy to jump into a match with a quick match button, or boil it down and find the exact gametype you are looking for.
The basis for the multiplayer modes is a bit like Battlefield 2 where your job is to capture and hold strategic points. You pick a role: air, ground, support or infantry and are allowed to drop in units of that specific type. This forces players to work together in order to achieve victory in a match. Massive made sure to give players the tools needed to help communicate quickly and effectively. You can create requests on the fly for different unit types that instantly become hot click-able markers. This makes it easy to call in air support, or anti-air support, or whatever your support need may be. Action is fast and furious with little downtime.
With every gorgeous PC Game, there’s always the age old question: “How does it run on my PC?” From the accounts I’ve heard it can vary greatly, and this seems like a game that’s VERY video card dependant, especially in DX10 mode. For instance, on my FX-60 Vista64 machine with 2 Gig of Ram and a 8800GTX 768MB I get rock solid frames of 50FPS or more at 1600×1200 with every thing maxed. A friend of mine has a similar build, CoreDuo 6600 Vista64, 2 Gig of Ram, 8800GTS 320MB and gets frame rates around 15FPS at 1280×1024. This is with knocking down details, etc. As soon as he disables DX10, the frame rates increases dramatically. DX10 mode doesn’t add much, but what it does add is really slick. And when you have the hardware for it, you’d like to utilize it. So it’s kind of disappointing to hear that. Other than that though, the game does scale very well for lower end rigs, and still looks fairly decent to boot.
It’s truly rare to find such a complete game today. With a solid Single Player experience that should take you 10+ hours to beat and an equally satisfying multiplayer mode, World in Conflict provides a great value at $50 in a gaming market where we find our dollar value shrinking. The game seems accessible enough for a novice RTS player, and the multiplayer seems deep enough to satisfy veterans. It’s been a long time since blowing shit up looked so good, sounded so good, and was this much fun.
Score: 5 out of 5
