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World In Conflict Review (continued)
More User Submitted World In Conflict Reviews
Date: 2008-01-02
Best RTS to come out in years
This game is one of the best and most well designed games to come out in years. The amount of detail and work that is seen in the game is amazing; you can zoom in or out and see every little detail on units from rocket damage to bullet holes. The Single player is fantastic but the multiplayer is where it really shines 4v4 class based combat. It isn't like the usual base building games but units are given to you through a point system, lose a unit and you get the points back slowly over time. Each player has to choose one of four classes and each class supports the other so if teamwork isn't your thing this might not be the game for you.
Date: 2007-12-05
Incredibly addictive multiplayer action
This is an excellent strategy game. It blows Company of Heroes out of the water in every category...graphics, sounds, gameplay variety. It's simply suberb. Multiplayer matches are a blast.
BUY IT! :)
Date: 2007-11-30
Very enjoyable
I am enjoying this game very much and still playing it months after buying it (unlike some others that have come and gone very quickly).
The single player has had a lot of effort put in to it which should be commended in this day and age where the focus of most games is the online multi player. I'm not going to go in to the details, as this is covered in other reviews, but I will confirm that it is of a good length, well scripted, and good training for the multi player which is the strongest part of this game.
The multi player is definitely the most rewarding part of the game because of the way it is designed, which is that each player must choose a role such as armor, support, infantry, air, and to really be successful the players must work together, for example the support guys providing anti-air cover for the armor guys.
The units are well balanced and all have their strengths and weaknesses meaning that there is no one unit that dominates the game. Many of the units can do multiple things, for example the light anti-air tanks can also shoot at ground units.
Because there is no bases to build (which is good) you start off with X many command points and order your units via a menu. Your points slowly get added to and get boosted when you capture things and defeat enemy units.
The most fun bit of the multi player for me is the Tactical Aid menu that you use to call in things like Air Strikes, Tank Busters, Fuel Air Bombs, Carpet Bombs, and Nukes just to name a few. You earn tactical aid points by capturing strategic places and killing enemies which you then use to call-in the strikes. This takes some skill as they are not instantaneous meaning the enemies could move, so you have to plan it right. TA points can also be given to other players which allows teams to get the big stuff sooner.
The graphics, sound, user interface, and the way this game works are great. Also because it is a strategy and not a FPS is does not matter if your ping is little on the high side.
The game is well supported by the developers and there have been 3 updates at the time of writing this review, not only to fix little bugs but to make the game better and do things like adding a new multi player map etc.
I also like it how you create a profile on Massgate and then earn medals, badges, and honor stars for doing different things when you play because this gives you something to strive towards and it looks cool when you have lots of medals. Also you can upload an avatar / image for your profile which then also gets displayed on your units in the game, which is another example of the attention to detail that has gone in to this game.
So if you are after a strategy that is not overly complex, is well designed and implemented, that promotes team work, and if fun to play then World in Conflict is worth a look.
Date: 2007-11-19
Design problems
This is a single player review of WIC.
Its hard to understand the glowing reviews this game has gotten. Its a respectable RTS in the sense that it works as intended by the designers. Unfortunately, the design is seriously flawed.
Lets start with the story elements. The game starts out well, and indeed the story is more or less solid. You defend the US west coast from Soviet invasion, and in between doing that you flash back to battles you have fought in the ongoing war with the USSR in Europe. So far, so good.
Where the game narrative falls apart is in the characters. You have your CO, a Colonel, who barks orders at you. He's a reasonable if aggressive leader, and while he seems to bark out new orders every minute at least he is believable. Unfortunately, your colliegues are not. First is Major Bannon, who commands armor assets that occasionally provide you with support. The first rule of character design is Thou Shalt Not Annoy. Alas, Bannon is the Jar Jar Binks of WIC. His voice is annoying. He is ungrateful when you save his butt. He talks back to his superior officers. He questions orders, always, and complains about them. He disobeys orders routinely, and through negiigence and dereliction of duty kills high ranking liason officers and civilians. Did I mention his voice is whiney and annoying? He ruins the game. In the real military he would never make Major, in fact he would never make it past 2nd Lieutenant. Military officers are among the toughest, most squared away people on the planet. They have to be. Minor mstakes are career ending. Major mistakes get you imprisoned. Yet this whiny, girllish Bannon persists through most of the game. Disobeyed orders and killed civilians and allied soldiers? Well - the story goes - the Colonel gave him a dirty look as punishment. As if. In the military of 60 years ago he would have been executed by firing squad. Today he would be imprisoned. In this game he will command troops and annoy you for the next 10 missions.
Thankfully, Bannon gets relieved of duty, but his replacement is more of the same, minus the whiny voice. Who knew that the job of an junior officer in combat is to second guess, undermine, and put down his CO instead of - say - actually carrying out orders and accomplishing the mission? Its obvious that the developers never had any military advisors working with them. The game is an insult to the military. This is a strategy game and you should recognise that your customers might just have served and cannot stand - cannot stand - your depiction of officers as whiny babies who cannot get the job done. In my experience the average company-grade officer in a combat arms unit is tough, smart as hell, brave beyond measure, iron-willed and tasked with a job so difficult that many civilians would whimper at the responsibilty and power they wield. Imagine that the next time you screw up at work fully a tenth of your coworkers are killed outright, or some high number of innocents are dead. Thats the pressure they work under. Show some respect. They earn half what the developers of this game make.
This may seem like an overly pro-military critique but the thing to understand is how these characters totally undermine the immersion of the game. Simply put, the story is DOA for not taking the military seriously, and instead offers up a charicature that probably jives with the designers pop-culture sensibilites, without them even realizing it. Even of you think this would not annoy you, read on. Narrative is only one of several big problems with the game.
Now that immersion is circling the toilet bowl, lets look at gameplay. Unfortunately, its tedious. You start missions with some good sized maps, and apparently the designers were so impressed with themselves that they feel that you must visit every inch of them. Every few minutes you're ordered to rush across the map to a new objective. You are whipped around the map without reprieve. In between you will be tasked with secondary objectives that - you guessed it - whip you around to even further flung corners of the map. By the end I couldn't stand the Colonel or anyone else in the game. I literally felt like I was playing VirtuaTennis with my units as the ball.
Taking an objective means camping some areas on the map, holding ground. Too bad these areas are spread out and wildly exposed. Want to take this area by setting some infantry up in the woods meters away? No chance. They must be parked out in the open where they can be cut down. This wouldn't be so bad except you must simultaneously hold 3 or 4 such areas, and they are just far enough apart to prevent any kind of interlocking fields of fire. They might as well be on opposite sides of the map. This, primarily, is how the game introduces difficulty, since the units are powerful and easy to keep alive, especially infantry, which are amazing death merchants. Two antitank squads in proper cover can crush a massive armor invasion far better than any two tanks could, so the designers decided the best way to prevent that is to make you spread them out. The final mission takes this to such heights I was laughing to myself when I saw it.
The other glaring fault is the dependence on support fires. Throughout the vast majority of the game you can call in huge amouts of artillery and other support fires to obliterate your opponent. While this is a fun for a bit, eventually it becomes clear that support fires are at least as effective as all your units combined, and you end up spending a lot of your time calling in fires instead of - you know - moving your units strategically in real time.
All in all this game is a major letdown. Company of Heroes is vastly superior in every way. It is more strategic, the missions are better designed, the voice acting is better, and it respects the men it simulates. The gaming press cannot be trusted. There is no way this should have got 90%+ from most of the top reviewers. I give it a 60% only because it looks nice, controls well and is free from major bugs.
Date: 2007-11-15
Not for anyone with anything less that a 8800 GTX
Ok, this game is not worth buying at all right now for anyone with anything less that the most powerfull current graphics cards. If you have any NVIDIA 7000 series cards, forget it. It won't even run. I'm also concerned that it will actually DAMAGE your hardware. I'm serious. Even on my son's machine with the NVIDIA 8800 ULTRA it still overloads the graphics card and locks up the machine so you have to power down get out of the dead lock. Really bad. Check the forums on this, a lot of people can't get it to play at all or if they can, it causes horrible lock-ups and crashes. I've patched the heck out of everything, added the latest patch for the game, still will not play at all on a Core 2 Duo 2 ghz machine with 2 gigs of ram and a NVIDIA 7600 series card. Can't even play the crapy cut scenes with out locking up. Only game I've ever had any trouble with like that in the past 6 years on any system. Not sure they ever tested this thing on more than a single configuration.
Definitely wait a few more months and for another half dozen patches before buying this. It's probably dangerous for your machine's health.
Game play is ok. Like other people have said, the entire strategy is to place your units in the little circles and hold them for X number of seconds. The enemy has inifinite forces. Sometimes you do too. Not sure how realistic air dropping tanks in to the middle of a combat zone is either.
The "movie" scenes are a joke. Still drawings with stupid personal backgrounds of some of the characters. So one guy has an abusive step-father... great... another's wife/gf doesn't like the fact that he's in the army... gee... what's the point of that? Just wastes time and has NOTHING to do with the game play, it gives you no information on missions or anything usefull. Is it so you think of your units as real people? How can you do that when the units in the game come in infinite supplies, don't gain any experience from battle to battle etc. Games like this really need to have experience added to units that make it from battle to battle. They seem to gain rank/experince in the battle but then you start the next battle with a completely new supply of green units again. So, two days ago you were commanding tanks, now you are incharge of a mixed infantry and armor set up, then you're running air cav. All of this as a lieutenant?
The graphics are great if you can get them to work at all. If you like arcade games this is probably a good game. If you like any kind of strategy, continuity, realisim, or a game that works out of the box, forget it.
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