World in Conflict Review

[tmeacham]

Review written by Rob Wright.

World in Conflict brings a nightmarish World War III scenario to life and raises the action level for the strategy genre. But is it a true RTS? Or is the game so good that it doesn't matter?

http://www.tomsgames.com/us/2007/09/28/world_in_conflict/

 

[TerraHawk]

I was sadly dissapionted in the game. Another in a long line military "clickfests" for the MTV ADD generation. There is very little strategy in a game when 98% of you time is spent clicking on individual units to utilize their special offensive and defensive capabilites. My father described World War II (101st airborne) as a week of boredom followed by two hours of stark terror. Strategy is the careful decisions you make in the week of boredom. Somewhere between Civilization IV and BF2142 (both among my favorites at the extremes) lies a game where top level strategy is as important as decisions made in the heat of combat. The difference between winning and losing should not be whether you can micromanage each of your units to dodge the individual bullets fired at them.
I am still waiting for the game were those of us who have studied the Art of War can compete with the 12 year olds with lightning reflexes. COH had promise but insufficient AI help with your units (for example, anti-tank units failed to retarget their gun if a tank was a foot out of thier assigned coverage arc).
Bottom line is this ... if you are 12 (or 12 at heart), it is a very nice game. In fact, I will sell you mine for a very good price.

 

[kingssman]

Alas finally a game that doesn't deal in resource management. Most RTS games have 2 strategies. Build the best most elite units, build as many of them as you can, and Zerg the enemy. Or build as many cheap low level units as fast as you can and Zerg the enemy before they can build their defenses.

Usually single player falls into the first strategy.

 

[randomizer]

Game looks nice, but the multiplayer is not that amazing. This is more "user error" though. Rarely do people actually play as a team with all roles filled evenly. Everyone plays on their own, so the whole point of the game, whereby you are supposed to play as a team and support each other, fails.

 

[elcold]

The reviewer says the concept of Soviet Union invading the US and Europe has not been done before in an RTS, umm did he miss Red Alert 1 and 2?

 

[robwright]

The reviewer says the concept of Soviet Union invading the US and Europe has not been done before in an RTS, umm did he miss Red Alert 1 and 2?

Sorry, I guess I should clarify that point. What I meant was, a realistic World War III scenario between the Soviet Union and U.S. during the Cold War era had not been done. Yes, the Red Alert series was great stuff and it did deal with a Soviet-U.S. conflict and an alternate timeline. However, Red Alert also had time travel, Albert Einstein killing Hitler, and psychic warfare. So it's not really the same thing, at least in my mind.

 

[robwright]

hmm, not sure if i should pick this up or not, i don't really have the time but you do make it sound fun. still AI being bad will annoy the hell out of me. Like terrahawk little things will annoy me like the AT guns in CoH or the infantry running out into the open from behind a wall due to machine gun fire, grr.

still, were you talking about the opposition AI or your own forces? It might not matter if it is the opposition, it will if i lose because of my own units not using "common sense".

I was referring to enemy A.I. In some places, it's works well -- for example, when you're trying to defend a Command Point, the AI will mount some clever bait-and-switch attacks and focus their attention on the weakest point in the triangle. But in other missions, you'll be dealing with some dumb Russians that will attack head-on, and it will take the fun out of it because they're just too easy to mow down. You can raise the difficulty level to high, but that also has it's problems. In some missions, the difficulty curve goes WAY up and it can be entirely frustrating. Seriously, I had a Richie Tenenbaum-like meltdown on one section, it drove me bonkers....