RTS heaven... or RTS hell?
Well, let’s start off with the trickiest part of any RTS to get right, and that’s the pathfinding, even the greatest of RTS games have had issues with this and Will of Steel can proudly stand alongside them in that respect. In fact, I’d put WoS head and shoulders above most of its peers as it has taken pathfinding stupidity to new levels. Units can’t seem to figure out even the simplest of problems and you can utterly forget anyone or anything moving out of the way to let something else by. The frustration in watching an unsupported tank get blown to pieces because your entire platoon is backed up behind one Humvee is immense. One crouched trooper can halt the entire column and there is no way he’ll move until you tell him to.
But it isn’t just your own troops who hold each other up. If real life was anything like this, the USMC would still be stuck at the airport waiting to embark, foiled by a cunningly placed plastic road cone. Obstacles such as burnt out vehicles are seemingly insurmountable for the latest in US tank hardware. If Saddam had know that a burnt out Fiat could stop a battalion in it’s tracks, I think ‘Iraq 2003’, as GMX so charmingly put it, would have gone very differently indeed.
Now compound the poor pathfinding with a fog of war system that operates with a smaller radius than weapon ranges and you start to get a truly annoying gaming experience. Enemy fire comes in from areas you can’t see, so you’re forced to send scouts out, under fire and hope that they don’t decide to swerve around a foot high rock into a murderous crossfire. When you do finally get the enemy in sight, it’s then a case of shuffling everyone else out of the way to bring up the tanks, by which time your scout is dead, you’ve lost sight of the enemy and now your tank is exposed with no infantry support. You did call for infantry support, but they’ve buggered off down a valley because there was a matchbox on the path that they couldn’t get around. Ok, so I’m exaggerating a little, but having nearly rammed my keyboard through the screen out of sheer frustration I think it’s fair to say that as gaming experiences go, WoS is more frustrating than trying to get a game to run back in DOS back in the good old 486 days.