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Theatre of War

You'll never get the Purple Heart hiding in a foxhole!

On the larger scale, ToW is all about tactics. Flanking the enemy, sending units in a logical order and protecting important assets are key aspects of combat. At first, I would mistime (or omit) one or more of these steps and end up in a world of hurt. Attempts to use sheer firepower to turn the tide after such blunders were dealt with swiftly by the enemy AI. The game moves quickly once the first shots are volleyed, and mistakes made early on can affect the outcome much later in the battle. Choosing the best available troops for the task at hand means that micromanagement is a factor as well. For instance, a solider with a good Driver rating should be at the controls of a tank, while a soldier with a good Gunner rating should complement him on the gun.

Visual effects aren't groundbreaking, but at least you can't hear the accompanying audio in this screenshot.

To the victor go the spoils: vintage China teaware.

Sending troops with poor Marksmanship ratings to a crest with the intent of picking off the advancing enemy is a bad decision. The contrast between battlefield management and individual troop selection is stark. In terms of scope, it's a pain to manage, and the constant switching between a near-first-person view and a battlefield view is unsettling. Grouping units can help with troop management tasks, but the difficulty is inherent in the game mechanics. Casual gamers need not apply; even for the experienced and patient player, ToW can be an exercise in futility and frustration.

Visually, ToW offers nothing noteworthy. Models – both troops and vehicles – are of the low-polygon variety, but the animations are well-done. Textures are mediocre at best, which isn't surprising for an engine which makes light use of last-generation Shader Model 2.0-effects. The game's landscapes lack variety; it seems as if you're always playing on some variant of a small agriculture town. To make matters worse, at a very moderate zoom height the LOD algorithm turns the landscape into an unintelligible, blurry mess.

The weather effects, such as rain and snow, do little to add to the bland atmosphere. With the understanding that graphics are often secondary in a tactical simulation, ToW's visuals certainly don't detract from the gameplay. However, CoH raised the bar for RTS graphics, and unfortunately ToW's engine is barely capable in comparison.

Play at the lowest graphical settings at your own risk. The textures in particular are washed-out messes.

Medium graphics options offer a more believable game world.

Like the visuals, the game's audio fits the bill but isn't great. The in-game music is a nice orchestral score and provides an appropriate ambiance, but I quickly grew tired of of the dramatic pacing. Sound effects are there, but the monotony of hearing the same explosions and tank firing sounds over and over led me to turn the effects volume down. The voice acting adds a level of depth to the characters, but it's used sparsely and tends to be repetitive. Some voice-over work for instructional audio during the training missions would be a welcome addition.

ToW has some niggling technical issues which detract from the gameplay experience. In a world of complex software and widely varying hardware configurations, problems are to be expected, but some bugs can't be traced to hardware issues. On a test system with an IDE hard drive – albeit a fast and freshly defragmented drive – load times were unacceptable. Loading a map took anywhere from 30 seconds (acceptable) to four minutes (rage-inducing).

That ToW has EAX positional audio support is commendable, but enabling EAX led to intermittent crashes on two models of Creative sound cards. Disabling it solved the crashing problem, of course, but left me with 2-speaker stereo audio. Some issues were more random: entering the menu during gameplay would sometimes lead to impossibly low frame rates (less than 5 FPS) after resuming play. Restarting the game was the only remedy. Saving and loading can lead to a crash-to-desktop, but the crashes don't happen on every save or load. Still, it's a bug that is inexcusable.

By far the biggest issue, though (and the most talked about on Battlefront's forums) is the poor multiplayer. Earning the dubious "broken" moniker, ToW's multiplayer component is barely playable on a LAN and simply unplayable over the Internet due to severe lag and synchronization issues. Battlefront promises that a patch for these and other issues is imminent, and new game features in the patch are being highlighted in a video on Battlefront's site.

According to Battlefront, fixing the multiplayer is a priority, and with any luck a matchmaking system will be added to Internet play. Performance optimization should be a high priority as well. The high system requirements are not reflected by the games visuals, and even though RTSs are traditionally CPU-intensive, ToW needs an unusually fast processor to deliver a playable experience.

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