World In Conflict

Hello. This review is about a computer game called World in Conflict. You play it on your PC. You make men shoot other men. When all the other men fall over, you win.

Those opening lines are about as exciting and innovative as the game itself, and sum up nicely almost everything you need to know. There is nothing particularly wrong with World In Conflict. The individual parts of it are all competently done, but yet when you put it all together, it has a sort of low-key, depressing tedium to it, like spending an afternoon with your aunt, or seeing a dog being sick at the side of the road. This game has been done a thousand times before and is really no different from any ancient old RTS fogey, from Red Alert onwards. And even then, you had amusingly over-the-top FMV sequences of Stalin strangling his subordinates or getting poisoned by his sexy female head of secret police - whereas here you have boringly self-important intro speeches by Alec Baldwin.

The pretty colours and loud noises decieve you into thinking this game has substance beyond that of a dead pigeon

So I can't really be arsed to review this game in any proper context. I feel vaguely insulted that I played it in the first place. I'm not going to say that my time here on Earth is as valuable as that of Jesus – that's for you to decide - but you all know exactly the sort of game it is, and the most damning thing I can say about it is that you can figure out everything there is to really know by just looking at the screenshots. It does nothing particularly new or exciting. The explosions are nice. The sound is good. You can call down a confusingly large amount of off-screen artillery and airstrikes – and that is about it really.

The lovely graphics and smooth animations serve to distract the brain and fool the senses

Instead, I shall pedantically and cynical de-construct the flaws in the military reasoning that underpins the game's plot and development, which will not only be exciting and interesting for you to read, but, and I'm sure you'll all agree, is also an excellent chat-up strategy. Feel free to use it as a conversation piece next time you are trying to woo someone.

(I would warn about SPOILERS BELOW, but really, the plot is so poor that I am in fact doing you a favour and saving you from having to discover the disappointing reality of it on your own. No need to thank me. That's my job. In essence, I am dying for your sins, so touching on my earlier theme, again, you can perhaps see the similarities between myself and Jesus.)

1. The Russians invade Seattle

What the fuck? What sort of fucking military retard came up with this idea? Who the fuck wants to invade Seattle? Were they Frasier fans and wanted the Space Needle as a souvenir? (The observant pedants among you may point out to me that Frasier wasn't actually IN Seattle in 1989, he was propping up a bar in Boston with Norm and the others, but you probably didn't notice that, so you should be ashamed at your own lack of knowledge of 1980s seminal American sitcoms. Are you ashamed? Good. Then I'll continue.) At the very beginning of the game, before you have to think about it too hard, this is kind of cool. Russians invade America! POW POW POW! That's badass and exciting. No fucking around – right in there with tanks rolling off the docks and helicopters popping out of containers and shooting up shit! But then you realise you are not 11 years old anymore and can understand that this is an awful idea.

Seattle is in the middle of fucking nowhere. It has no military value whatsoever. The Russians seem to have no plan at all beyond WE NEED TO FUCKING INVADE SOMEWHERE AT ONCE. It's not even on the proper fucking coast, you have to go miles up a huge, convoluted bay to even get to it. You learn a little later on that they have decided to push for some sort of research facility, almost as an afterthought - “Well jeez Petr, we took Seattle, what do we do now?” and want to find out its secrets, but Jesus, you wouldn't launch a massive cross ocean invasion to do that – you'd drop a bunch of Spetsnaz on it, with all balaclavas and knives and shit.

Then a little while later, you realise that the Russians are already fighting in Western Europe and that “America's Army” is over there, and that's why Seattle can't be defended properly. So, America would just send ALL of its army over to Europe? Of course. How silly of me not to realise this. That is almost as dumb as Russia's idea of invading whatever the fuck is closest to them.

Something's going on . . . some troops are . . . The Russians nearly . . . I'm sorry, I just don't fucking care

2. The military chain of command makes no fucking sense

Your boss throughout the whole game is a fucking Colonel, who seems to be in charge of everyone and everything. I don't really know the difference between a Major and a Colonel or whatever without looking on wikipedia, but I do know that Colonels are not in charge of whole fucking armies. Actually, wait a minute – in the name of good investigative journalism, I will check – and in fact, wikipedia tells me the typical modern Colonel is in charge of a brigade, around 3000 to 5000 bodies. What the fuck did people do before wikipedia? I have no idea. For all I know, humanity was ignorant for 2000 years, then spent 5 years using Microsoft Encarta, before finally evolving into using wikipedia to solve all of its problems. Either way, a Colonel is not in charge of everything in an army. Someone needs to tell him this and calm him down a bit.

Then as we go down the chain of command, things make even less sense. Captain Bannon (who is an amusingly cowardly character and well voice acted) seems to be in charge of all the tanks. ALL THE TANKS. All of them. A captain. Now what I do know is that a captain is generally in charge of a company, which can be around 100-300 men, or the equivalent bunch of tanks and stuff, if he's the armoured type. I also know that a Captain often reports upwards to a Major, of which there are none in the game – he does not take over all the fucking tanks he wants!

Then even more oddly, your character is a type of junior officer, a lieutenant! Yet YOU seem to be in charge of whatever the fucking Colonel thinks you should be in charge off – huge squads, helicopters, tanks, airdrops, laser guided bombs, napalm strikes, the guns of a battleship, and at one fucking point a godddamn NUCLEAR MISSLE.

The only explanation to all this is that America was REALLY SERIOUS about sending its army over to Europe, and that you three are the only officers left in the entire continental United States.

I see the flashes and explosions here, and feel nothing but pity as one would when seeing a disabled man chewing on a grey sock

3. No one is using nuclear weapons

This is frankly unbelievable. If the T80s started rolling over the Berlin wall at any time in the 1980s, it is pretty reasonable to assume that at some point, big red buttons would probably have been pushed and a whole lot of shit was going to end up mushroom-shaped. It already came as close as possible to happening in the real world as it could have without actually occuring, and that was without any direct conflict between the US and the Soviets (although not in the same time period as the game, read up on the Cuban Missile Crisis, history fans, and be prepared to shit your pants. I'm sure you are vaguely aware of it being a dangerous incident, but until recently I had no idea just how dangerous - at times only a phonecall away from certain nuclear destruction, it really is quite frightening).

In fact this statement of mine is not entirely true – you do get to drop a smaller, tactical nuclear weapon, in order to wipe out a large number of Soviet forces on US soil – but apparently, this is ok, the games narration informs me, by essentially saying “the Russians won't mind, because we are using it inside our own country.” Yes, of course. They wouldn't mind at all, even though they have shown the ruthlessness needed to invade both Europe and America at the same time. How nice of them to play by Queensbury rules. 

More explosions. Colour too. The hopelessnes of man's endeavours fills me with ennui and a cold, dead heart

     4. The infantry squads consist of only four men

Sometimes it's four. Sometimes it seems to be five. Either way, it's fucking retarded. You will rarely command more than 15 individual soldiers.

     5. The units are fucking tiny

So you are forced to make a choice between either being zoomed in to see the animations and accurately direct and click on them, or zoomed out so you can actually understand what the hell is going on in the battle, which way is north, and where all your other units are, and why people are shouting at you and telling you to go somewhere else. 

     6. All reinforcements are delivered by airdrop

Including tanks, using cute little parachutes. Fucks sake.

     7. The Americans don't notice a fucking army of Russians crossing the Atlantic.

Despite satellites and AIRPLANES and RADAR being present, and active, and used, in 1989, this whole issue is swept under the carpet by an emotionally wrought Baldwin informing us voiceover style that “Our navy was supposed to protect us while our army was fighting in Europe. It failed.” I am no military expert, but I know the invasion of Normandy in 1944 was the most difficult military operation of all time, with planning, logistics and secrecy up the wazoo, and this across only a tiny stretch of the Channel. To instead cross the frickin' Atlantic ocean, in a suspiciously huge fleet of civilian cargo ships, undetected, with enough manpower to invade a sizeable section of America, DURING WARTIME, is incomprehensible.

'Hi, this is the US Western Coastguard. I notice you have a lot of ships out there Mr Cargo-ship captain. What are you guys up to?'

'Um....we're not invading. If that's what you're worried about.'

'That's cool. Where are you going?'

'Umm. Seattle. We hear it has excellent tourist facilities. And also, needs cargo.'

'That's great. You go right ahead. I'll make sure not to inspect any of your ships as they approach the coast.'

I could go on. On and on. On and on and on, filling up page after page with constant depressingly bland substance from the game, like a blog version of a Michael McIntyre show. But you can probably already tell by my world-weary tone that I would rather lick my own armpits than continue pointing holes in this flawed piece of tedium. There's no challenge to it and it benefits nobody, like brutally lambasting the uneducated working classes for their pointless lives. It's just too easy a target. So I will end here, with a sense of dissapointment and frustrated melancholy that fills me with pity for the human race.

World in Conflict scores – bored sloth