Don’t blame me for another high-rating review, this is just one of the many great games released this year!
The Story
The story in World In Conflict takes us through an alternate reality set in the 1980s where the Cold War saw no end, subsequently leading to a World War.
The player experiences the war by holding the role of Lieutenant Parker (not related to Spiderman!) of the United States Army.
Gameplay
World In Conflict (WiC) is an RTS, however it’s not one of those RTS with the usual ‘Build, Gather resources, Build more, Spam, WIN!‘ formula. And unlike Company Of Heroes, you don’t even have buildings for unit creation NOR do you have structures for unit ability upgrade and so on.
The concept of WiC is simple – you are allocated an amount of reinforcement points to purchase units. Once any unit is destroyed, the resources are made available again. To make it more difficult, your reinforcement points are refunded to you BUT it will be made available by a small sum each second. Interesting eh? That means if you lose 2000 points worth of units, you won’t get 2000 points to spend immediately, it takes a while to order all of them again.
Since the units are delivered to you by air-drop, it will take a while before you can call in another air-drop. So the player has to decide – wait a few minutes and get all the goodies within 1 air drop or spread it out over multiple air-drops but have at least a few units on field to hold ground.
As for the drop-point, you can designate within the limited area that is in command.
The units are interesting, you have infantry units, support units, armored units and air units. Each unit has a special ability or 2 that might come in handy in the heat of combat.
Just as any RTS, you are allowed to order more advanced unit types as you progress in the campaign. The types of unit available will vary from one mission to another. Besides getting units, you are also allocated points to call tactical aids, like for example napalm strikes or artillery fire. You can even decide on how HEAVY should the tactical aid be, of course the more heavy the aid the more points it drains.
The most interesting thing about WiC would be its WASD-key controlled view of the combat location, probably the most flexible I’ve come by in any RTS game. The WASD keys control the movement of the camera (North, East, South and West), the mouse controls the camera direction and angle and the scroll-wheel on the mouse controls the height (elevation) of the camera.
Graphics and Sound
WiC is one of the most graphically stunning RTS I’ve ever come by, unfortunately it’s impossible to enjoy it’s beautiful graphics without having a decently powerful card. With cards based on ATI’s HD2600XT or nVidia’s 8600GT GPU, you’ll be stuck with medium / low details if you’re to play it at 1680×1050.
My 8600GT hates the game, it refuses to run at Medium details. It just crashes during benchmarks unless I disable some of the options in the game, and it happens regardless of what available updates I throw at it. The ATI card on the other hand worked fine with those settings on, hrmm…….so much for “It’s meant to be played”.
Well anyway, I recently manage to get a hold of the ASUS EAH2900XT (YAY!!!) so rejoice dear readers! The images you see on this review are capture with details set to the maximum level!
In between the missions, you also get a host of canvas-like artwork depicting the stories that involve various characters you come by during the game, showing their lives and how they are affected by the war at hand. It was amazing how those drawings give such a FEEL towards the game.
There are also cut-scenes in the game that uses the game’s 3D engine, unfortunately for these scenes – they’re just horrible to look at if you’re running on medium / low details. I mean really, can’t they make it like Lost Planet? 🙂 Those cut-scenes in Lost Planet are beautifully done! Video or not, they looked great. In games like Company of Heroes, the cut-scenes still looked decent even on medium details but for WiC – I’m just so disappointed on how lacking it is at medium details even though the cut-scenes are only animation of characters in conversation most of the time and don’t involve much fancy effects. In short, how GREAT it looks depends on your system’s graphic capability.
Oh yeah, about the sound – I’m more focused on the sound-effects than the soundtrack. The soundtracks are great but I can tell you that I just love how the sound of shells flying into the view and explosions and gunfire are all over the place. It just gets you into the mood of the war zone.
Another thing I really liked was the narration and conversation between characters, they made the whole game and any other story that unfolds ever more interesting.
Online / Network Gaming
Bored with the usual RTS online gaming experience? Then WiC is a MUST for you!
Why? It’s amazingly fun, it’s action all the way. Climbing the tech tree? Nah, forget about it. Just enter the game and give your best!
On my first game, my team lost – Not that I’m a n00bie or something (well I am) but I joined the match pretty last minute and so happened to be on an already losing team. My team won on the next game though! 😀 I played support role this time and all I did was tried my best to help out by listening to the commander. Yup, it was great. A little cooperation and coordination goes a long way.
In multiplayer mode, you get to choose type of units you wish to be in charge of – infantry , support , armored and air. I went with the support role, doing the best I can with anti-air units and artillery units. It was fun dodging it out with other players across the globe. It was slightly laggy when I was playing it but overall it was playable.
Apparently I was playing DOMINATION game where the team that holds the majority of the command bar before the time ends OR by holding it complete. 2 other game modes are available.
Assault – one team is on offensive while the other defends.
Tug of War – teams battle for more ground, the winning condition is that either the team holds most of the ground when the time ends OR when the team holds all the ground.
Conclusion
No game is perfect, World In Conflict is nice but apparently it has some issues here and there and what I dislike the most about the game is how it’s so reliant on the computer’s graphic capability. Games like Company of Heroes provided nice graphics even on a sub-RM500 graphic card while WiC on the other hand provides graphic that you couldn’t exactly say NICE on cards of such level unless you turn the resolution down.
Graphical issues aside, the game is a totally immersive experience for those who love modern warfare and tactical style of computer gaming.
Ratings
PC Specifications Used
Processor : Intel Pentium Dual-Core E2140 @ 3.2ghz
RAM : 2GB DDR2 667
Motherboard : ASUS P5K-E
Cooler : Xigmatek HDT-S963
Graphic Card : ASUS EAH2900XT 512MB
Monitor : 20? Dell UltraSharp Wide-screen LCD
Great game! Though the WASD need time getting use to since all RTS we played uses mouse scrolling.
Currently I play WiC, Supreme Commander, CoH and C&C3:TW. 😛 So for each game I have a brain-mode.
played this game before,its something different from the average RTS,nice game but takes time to get used to it lol maybe i’m just slow
interesting… will be on the lookout for this game also…