World in Conflict Beta impressions

Oh, then there’s everyone else too

Of course, even the best looking and best playing RTS game ever isn’t anything if it doesn’t have a decent interface through which to join multiplayer games.

Thankfully then, World in Conflict has a efficient and cool-looking interface which lets gamers sort multiplayer games by any category and has a both a friends and acquaintances list, the former of which is for regular enemies/allies, the second of which lists all the people involved in your recent matches in case you want to settle a grudge later.

We did have a few problems with the beta however, mainly because the ‘Play Now!’ button which is used for quickly finding the first available space on a server seems to actually go through each individual server in order. Even just on the beta version, that’s still a lot of servers to wait for.

Unusually for a beta version, we weren’t able to find any bugs or glitches in the game and the game seemed perfectly balanced and paced from the time we spent with it.

Additionally, the game is full of nice touches which are so small that a casual player may ignore or skip over them but which, to an RTS veteran, really speak volumes about the excellent game design. The score meter is an excellent example of this, appearing as scale at the top of the HUD with a Soviet and American flag at the top which slides about to reflect who is currently winning.


This scale is both useful and good-looking and serves as an excellent way to quickly gauge how a battle is going. This is especially the case when complemented by the chit-chatter of military lingo that hovers in the background of the fight and which automatically details how the battle is changing minute by minute both on a small and large scale. One minute a voice may be telling you that you’ve lost a single unit or that the reinforcements are ready, the next it’ll tell you that somebody has napalmed a forest to the north and killed some enemy infantry. The voices are excellently cast and fit into the game perfectly without sounding repetitive or oppressive.

Early Thoughts...

That just about wraps up our look at the multiplayer beta of World in Conflict, but what do we think of it overall?

Well, part of us is very excited. Very excited. The game looks not just awesome, but awesome to the max; the type of game which might make us use words like ‘rowdy’ and ‘gnarly’ if we were cool surfer dudes. Instead, being tech geeks we have to settle with saying that the volumetric smoke effects are awesome and the camera controls are both excellent and intuitive, allowing full and free-roaming control.

Gameplay is excellent too, the perfect blend of small squad action, cooperative teamplay and edge-of-seat large scale battles. Units are excellently priced and balanced so that gameplay never gets too old and, while the unit selection is quite limited, there’s still plenty of variation there to keep us entertained.


With a good interface to round it out and a massive number of available servers for the beta alone, World in Conflict appears to be a game which has it all going for it.

But somehow, part of me thinks that something critical is missing – though I seem to be the only one on staff who thinks so. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the game just doesn’t feel as varied and revolutionary as I would have hoped and I can see myself getting tired of the multiplayer mode within a month or two.

A large part of that may be to do with the hype surrounding the game, which seems to have built it up as more than simply a very good-looking RTS, because while the game does look great, the gameplay is very similar to Ground Control, Massive Entertainment's previous RTS game.

Still, even to me World in Conflict is addictive in the short term and the gameplay is solid enough even if it lacks the massive genre renovation we might have hoped for. Can the final, retail version iron out the few kinks and bring us a truly gripping singleplayer mode which will capture the hearts of gamers like myself? It’s certainly very possible and, if the game continues to develop as beautifully as it has done thus far, then it’s definitely going to be a very exciting year for RTS fans everywhere.