The RTS genre is fairly swamped these days. Granted, most of the titles out there are good ones, but there's often little to distinguish them. You just build, upgrade, make units, blow units up...snooze... - or try to avoid the latest rush tactics in multiplayer.

World in Conflict, however, manages to make real time strategies fun again. It has that perfect balance between speed and strategy that keeps you constantly engrossed, and thinking.

I remember seeing a rolling trailer of it at Nordic Game earlier this year – at the time I found it hard to believe that I was looking at an RTS – everything, the terrain, the the units, even the clouds in the sky, is that detailed and well done. If you don't believe me, watch the DirectX10 trailer – the sun / sky effects in that are crazily realistic.

World In Conflict doesn't bog you down with all the big decisions – you're a Corporal, serving in the thick of the action. Soviet forces have launched a surprise attack on America, the American Army is busy elsewhere, and unprepared – so you, fresh out of Officer school, are playing an important role. Instead of worrying about base building and tech trees, you get reinforcement points for calling in units, and tactical aid points for cool stuff like nukes and artillery barrages. In the single player campaign, you get given your orders and a certain number of resources to work with, and you get on with your job. Should you lose a unit, the points it cost you will trickle back into the reinforcement point pool after a short time, so you do have some leeway, but in the later missions, that short time delay will be enough to seriously damage your chances of succeeding at the mission.

That doesn't mean that you don't have decisions to make – you do, but instead of playing the resource game, you have to balance your troops – what's more needed? One lot of heavy artillery? Or would a repair tank and a light tank be more useful? Should I keep these guys defending the bridge, or send them over to protect the anti – air guns? Where would an air strike do the most damage?

World in Conflict keeps you busy at all times, and in the single player campaign there is a real feeling of being part of a bigger war – your objectives aren't always to just kill everything – sometimes you're buying time for some weakened forces to retreat, freeing civilians, or avenging the death of a fellow solider.

The campaign is quite short in terms of number of missions, but each one takes an hour or so to complete, and is divided into several primary objectives, and three or four secondary ones. I found that on first play through, while the primary objectives were easy enough, I sometimes failed on some secondary ones – maybe that's because of my tendency to 'turtle' in other RTS games, but I do think that there's plenty of replay value in trying different difficulty settings, and aiming for all the medals.

The most interesting part of World in Conflict is the multi-player. Players are presented with a choice of playing each map as either support, armour, infantry, or air. The role you select affects the kinds of units you have access to. You can summon a limited number of units, and earn tactical aid points for damaging enemy units, or healing friendly ones.

The main multi-player modes are a domination style game where each side has to compete for control of as many of the command points as possible, and an attack / defence style game where you have to hold off the opposing side for a certain length of time, then for the next round you swap sides and have to attack.



In smaller multi player games you can select the 'few players mode' and have access to all the units in the game, but since most games are 8 to 16 players, this is rarely needed. Games typically last 20 minutes – although if one side has a massive advantage over the other in terms of skill level or role balance they can be much shorter – I have seen a game over in 6 minutes 30 seconds before, and I'm sure that is not the record for the shortest by a long way.

Players can drop in to a multi-player game half way through if there is space – in theory they can still make a good contribution to the game, since they will see a list of how many people are in each role and can take a role that the team needs. In practice, it seems that people just ignore the team needs and play what they enjoy.

The game has a built in VOIP utility, but after playing for a couple of days with voice enabled, I turned it off in disgust. I'm sure it's a great feature for clans that play together on a regular basis, but in general, allowing the general public to broadcast audio to strangers is 'A very bad idea. (TM)'.

Multi-player World in Conflict can be a lot of fun – on the one hand, it isn't as vulnerable to rushes, or rote map memorisation and 'I win' strategies in the way a typical 1v1 RTS often can be. On the other hand, a competent team can easily decimate a random group that does not know how to work together.

You can have some exciting matches just dropping in to random open World in Conflict multi-player servers – find a couple of roles you enjoy, and work with your team, and you will find yourself racking up tactical aid points and nuking your enemy in no time. The multi player has managed to be fast, tactical, exciting, and accessible all at the same time – you can have fun just dropping in to the odd game, or take it to the next level and play structured, serious warfare with your clan mates.

We tested World in Conflict on several machines – it runs perfectly well on an AMD 64 with a single GeForce 6800, although you need some eye-candy turned down. An SLI system with a 7800 is better, naturally, but if you are lucky enough to have graphics cards that support DirectX 10 then you can enjoy much, much better frame rates – the cosmetic differences seem mostly down to the 'little things' like finer particle effects, but the big benefit of DirectX 10 is being able to have the tactical map on one monitor and the normal view on another, which, considering the fast pace of World in Conflict, is a big advantage.

World in Conflict has restored my faith in the RTS genre – many have dismissed it because of the slant towards action game play, but do not underestimate the amount of tactical thought required in this game. Whether you're a hardcore RTS player, or someone who just likes nuking places, World in Conflict is THE strategy game for you.

Rating: 9/10