World in Conflict has no resource management. It has no base structures, no unit production, no meaningful objectives other than ‘kill the other guy over and over.’ Don’t worry though; it is still a Real Time Strategy game.
Massive Entertainment first pioneered this kind of free-form RTS game with Ground Control. That series was unlike many other RTS games and World in Conflict is just the same. It’s more Counter Strike than Starcraft.
The year is 1988. The Soviet Union decides it isn’t happy with the land it has, and invades Europe. We, being the wet pushovers we are, crumble with little resistance and call for mommy; mommy here being the brutal unforgiving war machine that is the American military. If you ever saw Red Dawn you pretty much know the entire plot to World in Conflict.
At the start of the game, it is a month later and the Ruskies have made landfall in Seattle. From then on, the campaign, lengthy and extremely well conceived, takes you on a wild ride of retreat and counterattack in the American Northwest, leading the remains of the military into the mountains. It’s World War 3, and in World in Conflict, you completely understand the scale of the engagement.
Scale itself is World in Conflict’s biggest success. The maps are huge - huge on a scale you probably haven’t seen before in an RTS game. Some are literally miles across. The amount of units too is sometimes overwhelming, and while certainly not to a comparable level as Supreme Commander, there are definitely armies fighting wars in this game.
You obtain units by airdropping them onto the battlefield. You have, at the start of a match, a set number of points to ‘spend’ on units. While these units are on the battlefield, they use up the amount of points they cost. When they die, you get the points back and can call in some more troops to send at the enemy. In this way, the game never stops, and no matter how badly the game is going, you can always come back.
This makes for some truly epic battles that can rage for much longer than your average RTS game usually does. The developers themselves have constructed the game in a way in which you can jump in and out of a battle with little effect on the overall game. With teams of up to eight per side, one player is just part of a whole machine of war.
The basic unit combat is just one minor facet of the larger whole. World in Conflict introduces Tactical Aid. For each enemy unit you kill, for each objective completed, for holding sectors and for repairing and supporting friendly or allied units, you gain Tactical Aid Points. These can also accumulate over time during the battle.
You spend these points on offensive and defensive abilities from off the map to turn the tide of battle. This can range from airlifting in a replacement bridge for one that has been destroyed, to replenishing damaged infantry units with para-dropped support. It also escalates incredibly quickly as you get more and more points. Napalm strikes call in a jet to burn a hole in a forest to make a path for your tanks. Tank busters strafe enemy positions, killing their armor. You can carpet-bomb a long section of the map with a thousand bombs from an overhead bomber. You can launch laser-guided bombs to strategically take out garrisoned buildings or bridges. Chemical warfare can choke enemy infantry hidden in forests. You can even, if you save up a large amount of points, call in a tactical nuclear weapon to kill everything on half of the map and irradiate the area for several minutes.
World in Conflict throws at you more toys than you can imagine. So much so that often the ground-based fighting seems to take second stage to the off-map abilities, and ends up being a meat grinder until one team has enough for a nuke.
The maps themselves take real damage; tanks can take cover in the 100 foot wide crater from a tactical nuke, infantry can hide in the charred ruins of skyscrapers and apartment blocks, transport vehicles can roll through scorched remains of dense forest cleared by a napalm strike. The maps are dynamic; they are living, and can affect the outcome of the game greatly. They also offer plenty of freedom to the player, allowing for a huge variation of tactics.
In single player, all of this tactical aid is drip-fed to you over the course of the dozens of missions. But in multiplayer, they are all available from the start. And while in a typical 16 player game, you won’t often see triple nuclear strikes or “daisy cutter” bombs blowing holes in the Earth, you do get brutal and fierce combat on all fronts.
While World in Conflict promotes battlefield level strategy as opposed to the smaller scale combat in Company of Heroes, it does end up most of the time being a gritty grinding affair, even with the top players. Units are, essentially, free and completely disposable, and function only to get you enough Tactical Aid Points to call in some meaningful offensive capabilities. Even the very elite players will still use their units in a disposable fashion, as the game does not penalize you for sending wave after wave of your own men out to die.
The main successes of World in Conflict also end up being its failings. While it is incredibly fun to jump onto a server and blow stuff up, in the end it feels shallow and even if you win, you do not get any great sense of achievement or satisfaction. That said, even if you lose, as long as you get to see some cool explosions (of which WiC has many) you still have fun.
WiC is a game not for hardcore RTS fans. I might even go so far as to say it isn’t an RTS game. It is so unlike anything out there, in scale and visuals, that it will be entirely hit-or-miss. The fast-paced and furious combat will appeal to many, but to the methodical and deep-thinking strategy player, it will come off as barbaric and archaic. Still, there is lots to like about this game, including Alec Baldwin’s soothing narration.
