World in Conflict

Units are selected and manoeuvred with the left-click/right-click method you'd expect, while sensible keyboard shortcuts and clear icons are available for everything else you need. For instance, your infantry become infinitely more useful if you station them in buildings. Two anti-tank squads, hidden in buildings on opposite sides of a street, can halt the advance of a medium sized armoured platoon with little trouble. You can select each squad, and right click on the buildings by hand - or you can click a button and they make for the closest building automatically. Vehicles can retreat, or follow each other, with similar efficiency. In a game where seconds count, such intelligent time-saving devices are incredibly useful.

The same is true of tactical aids – the catch-all title given to the awesome firepower you can unleash from afar. Napalm, tank busters, three artillery spreads of varying accuracy and power, air-to-air support, daisy cutters – there’s a lot of fun to be had just trying out each one, and working out the best ways to use them. Each comes with a price tag in tactical points, which refills over time. Each assault also has a deployment time before it hits – meaning artillery barrages against moving targets require some nifty timing - and a recharge period before it can be used again. While it’s tempting to use these options to bomb the crap out of the map, such an approach pales next to careful, considered deployment in the right place at the right time. This is also where the nuke option appears though, wisely, the game doesn’t dish these out easily. When you finally do get to drop the weapon you’ve been salivating over since first seeing the trailers, it’s done in a way that satisfies your thirst for explosion while maintaining a suitably sombre and serious mood.

The difficulty of the single player mode skews easier than most dedicated PC gamers will prefer - you'll want to ramp it up to Hard or above for a challenge - but there's a nice narrative flow and balance to the experience. As the Soviet invasion pushes east across the US, the scenery changes from city blocks to small towns, to mountains. The game also flashes back to the European conflicts which precede the invasion, and while the change of scenery is welcome, seeing tanks rolling through rural French villages leaves the game losing some of its distinctive edge and looking a lot like WW2 point-clickers like Company of Heroes.

Each campaign section is bookended by in-game cutscenes, phone conversations set to hand-painted slideshows and some fantastic narration from Alec Baldwin. The tone is just cheesy enough to tick off all the wartime clichés you'd expect - pregnant girlfriends back home, poignant children's toys discarded in rubble - but the game manages to inject character and intrigue into a scenario that could easily be dominated by destruction and mayhem. As beautifully presented as the single player game is, however, it won't last hardcore strategists very long. You can create your own custom scenarios to eke out more playtime, but most will make a beeline for the multiplayer, which is so rich that it's almost another game in itself. It's also where it really distinguishes itself from the competition.

I said earlier that World in Conflict plays like a strategy game, but feels like an action game. That probably caused a few hardcore PC gamers to balk, but it's really a compliment and this conceptual duality is most evident when playing online. Taking its cue from the Battlefield series, rather than the more obvious Command & Conquers of the world, the multiplayer World in Conflict experience is based heavily on teamwork and unit classes. When you join a game - which you can do at any time, thanks to a fairly slick drop-in system - you choose what sort of regiment you want to command. Infantry? Armour? Support? Airborne?

By forcing you to specialise, the game demands communication and co-operation with your allies. Barge in, start playing for your own ends and you'll get swiftly destroyed like the loose cannon you are. Work closely with other players, complement each others skills, and you become a formidable fighting force. When you find yourself playing with like-minded comrades, the result is fiendishly addictive. During the beta stage these two elements often conflicted - the casual drop-in access, coupled with a general lack of understanding as to what sort of game this was supposed to be, often nobbled attempts to foster an efficient team. Now that the game is open to all, it seems that this problem is receding. As more players get used to the idea of focussing their skills and collaborating with others, a decent community of clans is springing up and - touch wood - the prospects of finding epic, satisfying skirmishes are looking good. Lag was minimal in the matches I played and, for all the particle effects and impressive physics being slung around (zoom right in, and you'll see even the smallest chunk of debris gets pushed aside by passing vehicles) the game can be made to run on a mid-range PC without losing too much razzle dazzle.