

How do you secure and fortify a town square against a platoon of heavy tanks, mere minutes away? How do you react when that force is joined by helicopters from the east and anti-tank infantry from the west? Can you spare the resources to deal with the enemy artillery over that hill? Will that carpet bomb you just called in obliterate enough of the advancing hordes for you to survive by the skin of your teeth? There's no time to mull it over, you just have to grab the units you have, send them into action as best you can and think on your feet every step of the way. It's meat and potatoes military strategy at the frontline. Rather than making the game frustrating and linear, this actually frees you up to indulge in some real real-time strategy. The illusion of being part of a larger, ongoing battle is terrifyingly real. As you pull out and move on, computer controlled allies roll in to take your place. Victory doesn't come from destroying every last enemy onscreen, it comes from holding them back just long enough to receive the next order.

Fulfil your objectives, and do as you're told. Battles will rage around you - AI allies and foes slugging it out on street corners, artillery fire raining down from both sides - but you've got to barrel on through. In World in Conflict, you're not some high-minded mastermind overseeing the entire war, but a mid-level corporal following orders in a dirty urban scramble for survival. With a Soviet sniper picking off your explosives experts before they can bring down a key structure, you won't be distracted by how many paperclips you need to order for the War Office. Harvesting and resource management is most assuredly not on the agenda here. While other RTS games, such as the monolithic Supreme Commander, have pulled further and further away from the blood and rubble of the battlefield, Massive has always stayed close to the action.

Helicopters can be invaluable against enemy vehicles, but are require careful use if they're to survive the battle. It plays like a strategy game, but feels like an action game. The high concept here, that Soviet forces invade the United States in 1989, adds an interesting alternate-history wrinkle to the tanks-and-infantry template but what really makes World in Conflict grab you by the mansacks is the execution. In terms of features, there's little here that strategy fans won't have seen elsewhere - most notably in the sci-fi Ground Control series, where Swedish developer Massive first attracted praise. That doesn't mean, however, that it's particularly original or groundbreaking.
#World in conflict game play Pc
Take away the apocalyptic bluster, and World in Conflict is still one of the most indecently absorbing PC games of the year. While the astonishing pyrotechnics are certainly eye-catching, it'd be a shame if the game were to be remembered solely for its big bangs, luminous walls of flame and rolling banks of realistic smoke and ash. Of course, everybody already knew that since World in Conflict arrives under the considerable burden of being known as "that explosions game where you get to use nukes". Now that I've successfully made Eurogamer flash up on the screens of a dozen top secret US intelligence agencies (Kristan may be spirited away to some officially-denied torture dungeon, but just think of the page views!) I should probably explain that, ho ho, I'm just talking about the latest real-time strategy game to set PC hearts a-flutter. I'm giving very serious consideration to the idea of detonating a small nuclear device in a major American city.
