"Reduce, reuse, recycle"

If you haven't played any decent strategy games lately (for me it's been almost a year, and then some ten years before that) you'll be thankful that Sierra has released Massive Entertainment's World in Conflict.

Graphics: Overall, fantastic. I use a med to lower end pc, and I can still enjoy wonderfully detailed landscapes, battle scarred buildings and painstakingly detailed units at the medium graphics settings. If you have a higher end pc, you'll just be amazed how high World in Conflict raises the standard. The story takes you from the Pacific Nor'west, to Southern France, Russia, and then back the USA -with each area given it's own unique visual feel.

Sound: Overall, once again, fantastic. Battles are brought to life with technologically specific audio: Infantry's gunfire sounds nothing like a tank's, an Apache's vulcan cannon purrs gently as it unleashes round after round into enemy units. Cutscenes are expertly voiced by seasoned actors, and the music never becomes silly or annoying. My only grip was the decision to use actor Alec Baldwin (he of the interfamilial strife) as the narrator; a lesser well known talent would have been just as good, and less dry.

Gameplay: Overall, fantastic. Nauseating even, it's so good. World in Conflict opts not to beleaguer players with resource and base management, but instead gives players the ability to focus completely on tactics and each unit's specific abilities to maxmize involvement. You will rarely run into 'hey, how did that guy die?' moments, since so much of the gameplay takes place in small, frantic battles in which you are forced to either keep track of your small company of men and vehicles or be annihilated by an unforgiving AI. The AI in the Singleplayer mode is a bit predictable - you'll probably only ever face a tank rush augmented by a sprinkling of infantry or air units - which is a shame, because a more cunning AI could have made the game a bit more challenging. Multiplayer, however, is a blast, even if you're playing against bots. In Singleplayer, it would have been nice to have played from the Soviet side, and hopefully the developers are busy putting together an add-on for the Christmas season. But overall, like I've said before, the gameplay is just fantastic.

My final say (Positive): World in Conflict is a must play for anyone looking for an enjoyable and engrossing way to waste away a day off (like I did). Massive and Sierra have reused, recycled and reduced all the elements which worked in strategy games to reinvent the entire genre. You'll probably not see another RTS game in the Warcraft/Command & Conquer mode for some time, and for good reason. World in Conflict pushes the RTS/RTT genre to its furthest limits, and not a moment too soon.

Why I gave this a '9' and not a '10': World in Conflict, however fantastic it is, does suffer from a few annoying drawbacks. First and foremost is the length of the Singleplayer campaign. You can only play as NATO/American forces, and only see the war from their side. We're never told why exactly the Soviets chose Seattle of all places to launch an attack on the US, or why the Soviets have been so successful in the European Theatre. Second is the choice of Alec Baldwin, whose voice gets tiresome after the first cutscene. I usually just bypassed his narrations when I could, which is a shame because they reveal some of the backstory. But that's it. If we had had at least a Soviet/Communist campaign, I would have given it a ten in no time.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/01/07

Game Release: World in Conflict (US, 09/18/07)