Dramatic flaws

The list of voice actors who contributed to World in Conflict starts with Alec Baldwin, and is impressively long for a strategy title. Baldwin narrates the story during loading periods, and his narration is verbose enough that even slower computers can finish loading the level in the background. The story's written well and riveting enough to keep you listening, even though the "press any key" text is inviting you to try the next mission.

Some of the voice acting isn't quite up to the high standard set by Baldwin's narration, which undermines a few of the cutscenes and scripted audio cues during missions. There are minor bugs and inconsistencies as well, like the same NATO unit responding to a move order with a heavy German accent, and immediately afterwards to a firing order in perfect Queen's English. If you have time to zoom in and listen to your troops, you'll hear them talking to each other in their native language - a nice touch.

WiC's graphics engine is not best suited for the cutscenes.

"So it is Christmas, and what have we done?"

As a single player experience, World in Conflict has one major flaw. The game's control mechanism and perspective matches poorly with the story - the player is portrayed as an officer actually commanding troops on the ground, but there's no actual avatar unit that interacts with the game world. Your forces can get wiped out, but as the disembodied Lt. Parker, you can still call in for reinforcements and win the day. Having a command post on the map would have detracted from the game's no base building ideology, and an avatar unit would probably have posed major level design challenges, but I found my suspension of disbelief hanging by a thread during certain missions.

The greater game: multiplayer

The single player campaign's gameplay is based on, and limited by, the multiplayer; only unit availability and cost for different service branch (what Massive calls "role-playing elements" in the game) are relaxed. The flip side of this coin is that the single player campaign acts as an excellent tutorial to basic concepts of the multiplayer game, like commanding units, calling in reinforcements, capturing victory locations and fortifying them.

"We want [World in Conflict] to be the Counter-Strike of RTS gaming," is how lead designer Nicklas Cederstrom envisioned his game. That's a tall order: CS is the most popular multiplayer online first-person shooter, and possibly the most popular online game ever. The competition in the RTS arena is fierce, with old warhorses like the WarCraft, StarCraft and Command & Conquer series of games holding their ground well against relative newcomers such as Company of Heroes. To fight them, Massive goes for the masses by making World in Conflict easy to approach and play, and a team sport rather than a solo click-fest.

When tactics fail, scorch the earth!

An example of the small details - a lone sniper hides out in a battle-scared building.

There are no building queues to memorize because there isn't base building in the game; unlike almost all other RTS games, victory in World in Conflict doesn't depend on economic might, making real comeback victories from the brink of defeat possible. Tactics, manoeuvring, feints, reconnaissance, defense and all-out aggression win games in World in Conflict, but more important than any of them is teamwork.