Tactics involves teamwork

There are up to eight players in each of the two teams; each player picks one four roles - Air, Armor, Infantry or Support. The roles complement each other in a refined, four-way paper-rock-scissors game. Armor's tanks are vulnerable to Air's helicopter gunships, but Support's anti-aircraft vehicles can shoot the choppers out of the sky with ease. Infantry's soldiers are vulnerable to almost all kinds of fire, especially mortar and artillery bombardment, but they pack a punch with shoulder-fired anti-air missiles and anti-tank rockets.

Once they're in the cover of woods or a building, infantry can be very hard to take out. Support has regular artillery pieces as well as AA artillery, so choosing a Support role doesn't mean that you can't rack up kills - but you can choose to repair friendly units and transport them to battle as well.

Unlike RTS titles of old, the maps are fully destructible.

One must spend the resource points wisely - work with friends to support each other correctly.

Each player has a finite number of resource points they can use to call in units. If a unit gets destroyed, the resource points used to call it in are freed up, and once the point counter has recharged you can call in new units. Each of the four roles has access to special units not available to other roles, and get a resource point discount for unit types within their own role, but a player can call in a unit outside of their own role for a high price. No single player can field an entire army, navy and air force, however: even within your own role, you are normally limited to 5-10 units, and shopping outside your own branch will deplete your resource points after just a couple of units.

Ragdoll physics... in miniature!

This brings us back to teamwork. A team can field a much larger number of units if everyone sticks to their role, but that leaves the rock vulnerable to paper, paper to scissors and scissors to just about anyone who flanks to the rear. A tank column can be chewed up by helicopter gunships in seconds, but a Support player's AA vehicle tagging along can give them significant protection.

Similarly, even a single tank can save the Support player's heavy artillery from the enemy's flanking maneuver, buying enough time to call in some reinforcements. Teams can coordinate their fighting using the game's in-game voice chat, and there's a very smartly done tagging system that lets players request the right kind of help in the right time. All this leads to a great incentive to play for the team, especially as reacting to other players' support requests gives you points at the end of the match.

There's definitely no coming back from that one.

The best part of World in Conflict's multiplayer is how easy it is to get in and out of a game, with no waiting for a match to start and no hard feelings if you have to leave before a match is settled. Teamplay works great when it works, although sometimes you'll find yourself on a team that just doesn't play together and gets hammered every round. This is most common in Assault games that pit one of the teams in the attacker's role while the other has to defend, after which the roles are reversed and the more successful attacker gets the win.

An organized team can steamroll an enemy that doesn't know or want to use team tactics, and when defending shut them down with ridiculous ease, leading to very one-sided games and a lot of frustration for the losers. The other two game types, Domination and Tug-of-War, typically last longer and spread the fighting out across the map, allowing the chance of some individual success even in a losing team effort. And who knows, maybe you can rally the team and win a round - a comeback victory by the underdog feels like a real accomplishment.