Gary Grigsbys World At War is a very in-depth World War II simulation. It is a strategic, turn based war game, and it is not for the faint of heart.
Those of you who have played Gary Grigsby games before may see some improvements in the interface in that it has been toned down a little from his past incarnations. It is still intimidating and at times cumbersome, however.
There are several views with different levels of abstraction and all serving different purposes - no view gives you all the information you need to make an informed decision, however, so there is a lot of clicking around between views, making turns take a very long time.
The two tutorials will serve to give you an idea of the game, however you need to leave all the options set to default (including difficulty level), otherwise the tutorial may not work correctly - I learned this at my expense when I changed the difficulty level and ended up unable to meet one of the conditions for progression to the next stage of the tutorial because I did not have enough units.
The tutorial teaches you the basics, but in my opinion it brushes over a few too many things (although if it had included them it could have been accused of being information heavy) - it takes a lot of experimental play to really get to grips with the game.
World At War is much more than just a unit-based simulation - there are several other things to worry about such as resources and transportation. The game is geared towards the longer term, so resources take a lot of planning, and repairing the infrastructure of countries is an important task. Diplomacy does not play a part, however, which may frustrate some players because it does restrict flexibility.
World At War takes place over the length of World War II - it is a meaty simulation, but it is also fairly scripted, with certain major events being a certainty, no matter what you do to change them. This can sometimes be frustrating.
World At War offers multi-player functions, which allows for up to five players to play-by-mail. This sounds unusual at first, but given the long timespan of turns (in both thinking time and in-game time), it isn’t as bad as it sounds. If you play against the computer, the AI is competent, although sometimes rather plainly defensive compared to human players. This may annoy very experienced wargamers, but it does give those newer to the game a chance, and there are plenty of options in game in terms of difficulty.
The game centers around the map interface wise, with a lot of information crammed onto it. At times the map can get rather cluttered and confusing, although it does have a kind of ‘war-room’ feel to it, with a graphical style that really fits the theme of the game. The same can be said of the sound and background music. The interface can be quite complicated, and takes a while to learn at times. A turn can comprise a large number of actions, and it is easy to forget to do something in your first few rounds of play.
When combat occurs, you have the option of watching it play out in a special window, or you can skip that and go straight to the results. The combat window is similar to the one in Civilization, so in most cases you will probably just skip it. After a while the result of the combat becomes easy enough to predict - it is all based on straight numbers and statistics.
It is hard to fault this game for its interface considering it is a very in-depth, very serious war game. The correct thing to say would be that this is aimed at a narrow audience that like that sort of thing. There are plenty of other softer strategy games for the more casual player, and this game does a much better job of abstraction than, say, Hearts of Iron.
I would recommend this for the multi-player functions - get a bunch of like-minded friends together and you could keep yourself busy, and entertained, for a long time.
Graphics: 7/10
Sound: 7/10
Interface: 6/10
Single Player: 7/10
Multi-player: 8/10
Longevity: 8/10
Overall: 7/10
