Superb camera and controls
World in Conflict is essentially two games in one. On the single player side you’ve got a story driven RTS whilst the multiplayer veers from the tradition of playing alone or with a few allies and takes you into a team based RTS where you command a specific type of unit as part of a team. We’ll look at the single player first as this covers the game mechanics for both modes and then have a good look at multiplayer later.World in Conflict casts you a Parker, a lieutenant in the US Army who has the dumb luck to be back from a tour in Europe when the Soviets attack Seattle, the very place he’s gone to on leave. Now, like most RTS games, you’ve got a roving camera view of the battlefield which is very likely the most detailed and complex playing area yet seen in an RTS. Yes, the first thing you’ll notice are the graphics which, to put it bluntly, are bloody incredible.
As World in Conflict is an RTS, it takes a cue from the vast majority of other RTS games and has a simple to use interface that’ll be pretty familiar to fans of the genre. Except it makes a few changes that utterly alter how you’ll view the action. The problem with other camera controls is that in the middle of frantic action, they were just too clumsy and complicated… meaning you’d end playing from just one view point as it was easier than faffing about with keys and the mouse in the middle of some frantic action.
Click for larger imageWorld in Conflict throws all that out the window. Moving the mouse to the edge of the screen rotates the camera whilst W,A,S,D moves it around the battlefield and the scroll wheel controls your height above the battlefield. But the really clever bit is what happens when you push the middle button on your mouse. Now you have full ‘mouse look’ control and , just like in an FPS, you can swivel all about. Combine that freedom of the camera with the W,A,S,D controls and suddenly you’ve got an easy fast and, above all, intuitive way to control your view… which becomes essential later on.
Click for larger imageSo just by looking at how the camera is used and should be used, developer Massive Entertainment, have opened up World in Conflict, allowing you to get a bird’s eye view for tactical purposes, swoop around rapidly to see what’s going on elsewhere or just get in close on the action when you unleash a devastating barrage against the enemy.
Seeing as World in Conflict is based in the late Eighties all the weaponry that was around then is available for you to use. But this is a war and you can’t expect to have everything to hand all at once. As is the way with RTS games, new equipment in trickled in to you on a per mission basis but, as the storyline says you’re on the defensive, you’ll often find yourself with limited access to units.
Click for larger imageThe first thing you have to do is select a drop zone for your units to be delivered to, either ‘chuting in in the case of infantry or being dropped in cargo crates by a flare popping transport for everything else. There’s no resource collection or building here… this is a realistic approach to war with the production centres miles away. Similarly, there’s no research tree or weapons upgrades to be had. The whole war is over and done within a matter of months so considering it’s taken about a 20 years to get Eurofighter off the ground (which is 7 years late anyway), it’s hardly realistic that new weapons and armour would be developed in a just a few months.
The number and type of units you have is decided by the mission itself and the number of Reinforcement Points you have. This may change as you progress through a mission but generally you have a set amount which you spend to deploy the units you think you’ll need for the job. Once these points are used that’s your lot until a unit is destroyed and then the points are trickled back into your account to spend again.
Click for larger imageNow as limiting as this system sounds, it actually serves two purposes. First, it prevents you from just hanging back, defending and then building a huge force for a massed charge across the map. For those of you that like the build and rush approach, you’ll be buggered if you try it here. Second, it makes you take care of your units in the field as the points recovered from a destroyed unit are trickled back in over time, not immediately ready for use… so throwing units away in the hope of bringing in new ones could well lose you the map as you wait for reinforcements to become available.