Lord of the Rings Online

With a license as lucrative as Lord of the Rings, Turbine Entertainment could have simply created a World of Warcraft clone with Middle-earth nomenclature on it and called it a day. That The Lord of the Rings Online is such an accessible experience is bound to draw comparisons to the genre's leading title, but that it's so enjoyable to play is a testament to its great design. Its inventive aspects are peripheral, but they are there, and combined with slick and engaging questing, the package makes for plenty of appealing exploration.

The raven says 'caw.'
Tolkien fans won't be left in the lurch, either. The game is brimming with well-known characters and name-dropping galore, as well as familiar races that should please anyone acquainted with the LOTR universe. Men, dwarves, hobbits, and elves are all represented, along with seven total classes being up for grabs. For massively multiplayer game veterans, though, this doesn't make for a lot of choices when games like EverQuest 2 offer so many more combinations, particularly if you plan on playing multiple characters. On the other hand, there is a good variety of gameplay styles from which to choose within those limitations. Classes like the pet-handling lore-master and the stealthy burglar play much differently, and all of them have a role to play within a group of adventurers. Significantly, all of them are viable solo classes as well.
With narrative-focused MMOGs like Dungeons & Dragons Online and Asheron's Call 2 under Turbine's belt, it should come as no surprise that a group of story quests thread together your adventures. Completing each one rewards you with a high-quality cutscene, and it's in these moments that the license shines most. In your early adventures, it's tough to shake the feeling that you've seen most of these types of quests before in other fantasy RPGs. Once the story quests kick in, though, the immersion factor rises and the world's unique qualities come more clearly into focus.
It helps that Middle-earth is beautiful to look at and brimming with touches that distinguish it from other fantasy settings. Seeing petite hobbit holes or the House of Elrond for the first time are gleeful moments for fans. The Lord of the Rings Online does not feature the most technically proficient visuals, with occasionally simple geometry and relatively lackluster character models. On the other hand, the environments are simply breathtaking, featuring plenty of rolling hills covered with lush, colorful foliage and detailed architecture. Even the more barren reaches of Middle-earth look impressive--like the mountains of the Ettenmoors, where dead trees and torn flags litter the landscape. The game engine runs smoothly and has few frame-rate jitters on even more modest systems, so performance issues are not likely to stand in the way of your escapades.

Don't let the wolf-tamer title fool you: You get it by killing them, not turning them into pets.
The sound design is even better, starting with a striking and varied soundtrack that transitions seamlessly from one locale to the next. The tribal music that you hear when entering the Old Forest is exciting and bound to get your heart pounding, and the occasional orchestral swooping of Ered Luin is well attuned to the visuals. Voice-overs are top notch as well, though most non-player characters aren't all that chatty anyway. It's harder for an online RPG to distinguish its sound effects, but they are all quite good in The Lord of the Rings Online, from the growls of wargs to the caws of pet ravens.
The game's greatest asset is that there's simply so much to do. World of Warcraft may be the king of quest-based MMOGs, but The Lord of the Rings Online is no slouch, and in fact, you may find yourself with so much to do that you reach the 40-quest limit in your quest log more often than you would expect. The upside is that you'll never be stuck grinding because there's nothing else to do. The quests require you to roam about a good deal, which makes for some occasionally leisurely travel but gives exploration types plenty to see. Aside from the story quests, they mostly boil down to the usual go-there-kill-that missions. On the other hand, some of them are clever and fit well with their locale, such as the Shire quests in which you deliver food while avoiding the noses of hungry hobbits.

DiRT

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Fans of Codemasters' Colin McRae rally racing series are in for a surprise with the publisher's newest title, DiRT. DiRT has more in common with Digital Illusions' Rallisport Challenge series than the Colin McRae games of old, putting a greater emphasis on a variety of off-road racing disciplines, as opposed to sticking hard and fast to traditional rally racing. That's not to say that rally fans will be disappointed with the game. DiRT veers a good bit further into arcade territory than earlier games in the series, but it is still a blast to drive, and absolutely stunning to look at.

It doesn't look quite as astonishing in motion, but DiRT is still one superb looking racer
Let's just address that elephant in the room right off. There have been plenty of driving games of late that have been visually impressive, but very few live up to the visual fidelity displayed by DiRT. This game is a technical achievement in car design, track design, and damage modeling. To begin with, the cars are beautifully rendered, highly detailed models that are as fantastic to look at as they are to destroy. Damage modeling is one of the most impressive aspects of the game; you can lose bumpers or doors, break glass, tear up the paintjob, and roll your ride into a crushed, deformed mess. Tracks are equally beautiful and destructible. From the rain-slick tarmac tracks of Japan and the dusty backroads of Italy to the muddy, gravelly countryside of the UK, DiRT nails every environment wonderfully. The game also uses lighting to fantastic effect, not just to emphasize how shiny and reflective the cars are, but to give each track an individual atmosphere. Driving around desert mountains in the washed-out haze of late day is an amazing sight to behold, for sure. And if you feel like tearing up these tracks, you can bust through fences, barriers, bushes, and anything else not held to the ground with concrete. All the while, dirt, mud, or gravel will kick up against and often stick to your car, making the game's namesake seem entirely appropriate.
As amazing as the game looks, all that detail comes at a bit of a price. Performance is not always up to snuff, especially in races with multiple cars on the track. The frame rate is a little choppy during single-car rallies, but once you get a group of other cars racing with you, the game practically turns into stop-motion animation, especially if all the other cars happen to be bunched up with you. This is more of a consistent issue on the 360 version, though the PC version is highly taxing even on high-end hardware, so you're likely to run into some performance problems unless you're running a top of the line machine. Longer-than-average load times also tend to rear their ugly head (primarily in the 360 version). Even still, the game never becomes unplayable because of the crummy frame rate or lengthy loads, and at worst, these are merely annoyances.
The quality of the presentation doesn't begin and end with the in-game graphics either. Even the menu system is immaculately built. It's hard to describe it, except to call it a bunch of floating boxes with selectable options that zoom in and out as you select them. Even the loading screens are cool because they display real-time statistics on your game, such as your favorite tracks or vehicles, your average speed, and even your favorite driving surface. Menus are usually a forgotten element of a game unless they're specifically bad, so the fact that DiRT's are notable for how good they are says something.
Audio is not quite as immediately impressive as the visuals, but it is great all the same. Engine noise is probably the best aspect because each car has a definitive and unique sound to it that feels just right. Crashes and other racing effects are also excellently produced. The soundtrack isn't licensed, but the instrumentals that play over the various menus and replays are quite solid. The only damper on the category is your codriver, an obnoxious, bro-sounding dolt whose dialogue sounds like it was written by a nonnative English speaker and whose only reference for the language was reruns of Saved By the Bell. Lines like "Smooth and steady; I'm Mr. Smooth, and you're Mr. Steady," and "Yeah! We won the championship! I'm so stoked!" are funny once, but then they're annoying from there on out. At least he gives you some good info on the tracks before you race.

Once you've snapped out of the trance that DiRT's fantastic presentation tends to lull you into, you might remember that this is a racing game and that you do actually have to play it. It's a good thing it's a fun one. The game includes six different racing disciplines, which consist of rally, rallycross, hillclimb, CORR, crossover, and rally raid varieties. If you don't know what half of those are, don't fret. The game does a good job of easing you into the game's style of racing, with both some rather simple early races, as well as an explanatory narration by extreme sports maven and current Rally America champion Travis Pastrana.
Granted, even if you've never jumped into a CORR race in your life, DiRT isn't exactly a difficult game to grasp. You're racing down a course by yourself, trying to get the best time possible, or racing against other cars, buggies, or trucks on dirt and tarmac tracks. Most of the differences in gameplay come from how the various vehicles handle. There is obviously a big difference between driving a speedy Mitsubishi FTO and a massive racing big rig (yes, they actually have those). But even with all the differences among disciplines, the racing is always easy to pick up and play. DiRT has a decidedly arcade-driving sensibility that makes all the vehicles relatively easy to race with from the outset. Once you've gotten a feel for how all the different cars and tracks feel, you can simply crank up the difficulty, which in turn makes your opponent racers much more adept, and also leaves your car far more open to terminal damage. On the highest setting, all it takes is one good front-end collision to send you packing.
As realistic as the damage incurrence can be, the rest of the game definitely maintains an arcade mentality. Nearly all the vehicles have a decidedly floaty feel to them, one that seems to overcompensate for nearly every minute turn of the analog stick (if you're playing the PC version, you will need a dual analog controller of some fashion to play the game properly). It's not unmanageable or anything, but it's far from realistic. By the same token, the game's physics are often a bit silly, especially in wrecks. That's not an insult by any means because the exaggerated physics lead to some absolutely spectacular wrecks in many cases. But there are some eye-roll-worthy moments where you'll see a car tilt from lying on its side all the way back upright for no good reason or drive sideways up a cliff to land back on four wheels.
Floaty feel and wonky physics aside, DiRT is still a great deal of fun to play. Once you get a feel for the controls and up the difficulty a bit, the racing can be intensely challenging, addictive, and immersive. It's especially immersive if you happen to take in one of the game's two exceptionally good cockpit camera views. There's a zoomed-in view and a view that's a bit further back. Both views give you a great sense of being in the driver's seat, even going so far as to let you look around inside the car via the right analog stick. Not enough racers do the cockpit camera that well, and DiRT is worth lauding for doing it especially well.
As fun as the racing can be, it wouldn't be worth much if DiRT didn't offer up plenty of ways to experience it. Fortunately, it does the job. Apart from being able to take part in single races and events, as well as a series of championships, consisting of multiple races each, DiRT also has a lengthy, involving career mode that has you working your way up a literal pyramid of events. Winning races earns you points, which unlock new tiers of the career mode and cash, which you can use to buy new vehicles or liveries for said vehicles. With more than 60 career events, nearly 50 vehicles to unlock, and more than 180 liveries to buy for those vehicles, that ought to keep you busy.

Few games have ever displayed such dynamic damage modeling.
The one feature that DiRT skimps badly on is multiplayer support. There is multiplayer, but just barely. Only two disciplines--rally and hillclimb--are available to play in multiplayer. But wait, aren't those the two disciplines that don't have you competing directly against other cars? You bet. Essentially, you're dumped into a lobby with potentially dozens of other players, and from there, you vote on which track you want to play. The available list to vote on is always random, and there's no option to pick a different car or even search for a lobby with specific cars/tracks available. Once you're in a race, it's merely a time trial against all the other players. You can see how you're doing in the real-time standings, but that's all. While the Colin McRae series has never been known for great multiplayer support, the total lack of online racing in a game that debuts several wheel-to-wheel racing types is a gigantic tease and really disappointing.
That said, the multiplayer support is really the only thing about DiRT you can call truly disappointing. On every other front, DiRT delivers a racing experience that's a lot of fun to play and visuals that are such a joy to watch that you can even bring yourself to forgive the shoddy frame rate. All around, DiRT is a class act, and it belongs in any racing fan's library.
By Alex Navarro, GameSpot
Posted Jun 19, 2007 5:45 pm PT

Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword

There's a reason why the Civilization series is one of the oldest and most beloved strategy game dynasties you can find on computers today. The addictive turn-based games draw on real-world history and offer open-ended gameplay that lets you conquer the world as a warlord, diplomat, or scientist. They also have a disturbing tendency to keep you up late into the night taking "just one more turn." Civilization IV was an award-winning new chapter in the series in 2005, and last year's Warlords expansion pack helped make a good thing even better. And now, the Beyond the Sword expansion brings even more improvements to a solid foundation. The new game adds plenty of features that breathe new life into the core Civilization gameplay, and also tosses in lots of new content in the form of new modifications ("mods") and custom scenarios to play through. Not all of the expansion's additions are clear-cut improvements, but if you're a Civ fan, you'll find that Beyond the Sword will give you plenty of reasons to get hooked all over again.

The core game of Civilization IV starts you out with a national world leader who possesses a few advantageous "traits" in various specializations (military, scientific, economic, or cultural) and starts you off at a specific era in history to conquer the world through force, science, economy, or culture. Beyond the Sword adds new world leaders to play as, as well as new leader traits that help expand certain strategies, such as the "protective" trait, whose defensive properties aid players who seek to conquer the world using scientific research to win the space race, and the "imperialistic" trait, which greatly speeds the production of "settler" units that can be used to stake new claims in uncharted territory by building new cities.
The expansion also offers new options to create customized games to your liking, such as the handy "advanced game" mode, which starts you in a game about 10 turns in, unmolested. This helps get you into the game's truly interesting action (beyond just building your first city) faster. You can also opt to use the expansion's new events system, which randomly triggers various events that take place throughout the game. Many of these events aren't all that important, but some can have farther-reaching consequences, such as changing your standing with a rival nation. If nothing else, they add some welcome variety to the usual turn-based Civilization pace, and they can be toggled off if you don't care to use them in a custom game.
Beyond the Sword's more significant in-game features are espionage and corporations, which are interesting additions that bring even more variety to the game, though they aren't always practical or all that useful. Corporations essentially act like late-game religions; that is, just like with Civ IV's original religion system that let you spread religion from city to city, the expansion's corporations can spread around the world--though in this case, they focus on various economic specialties like cereal mills, mining companies, or even a chain of sushi restaurants. When used properly, they can provide powerful economic advantages, but they're balanced out by their substantial maintenance costs, even though these can only be accessed much later in the game.
Espionage, on the other hand, doesn't figure quite as prominently into the average game of Civ IV. This new feature was supposed to give you exciting new options with the new spy units, which can scout out other nations and perform undercover operations like gathering additional info on your rivals or stealing their technologies. Unfortunately, spies don't provide enough advantages to justify constantly pumping them out and sending them to the four corners of the world, since they frequently get discovered and captured before they can even get to enemy territory. In many cases, you may find yourself just skipping out on the turns it would take you to research espionage improvements to focus on your scientific research or military might. Fortunately, the expansion offers plenty of other accoutrements for the game's core strategies, including a fistful of new units, new combat tweaks to better balance siege combat, and an expanded space-race game for technophiles that makes a space-race victory not just a matter of who builds a shuttle first, but who builds the best and fastest one.

If that weren't enough, Beyond the Sword also packs in six new one-off scenarios plus five playable mods created by both in-house Firaxis developers and the fan community. Not all of the content is stellar--some, like the futuristic zombie-hunting scenario "Afterworld," don't quite hold up, though others, like the epic "Rhye's and Fall of Civilizations" fan-created mod, are excellent and provide a fresh new coat of paint to the core Civilization gameplay. Even though some of the mod content has been available publicly for some time, it's definitely convenient to have everything wrapped up in one place, and all the extra content will keep you busy for a good, long while--as you'd probably expect from the second expansion pack to a game that's infamous for stealing your free time.
Beyond the Sword's additions are primarily to Civ IV's core gameplay, so the expansion doesn't make a huge leap forward in terms of graphics or sound. But that's just fine, since the game's thematic, instrumental score continues to work well with the game, and the new graphics (in the form of new mod units and movies, as well as new leaders with new animations) fit into the game without a hitch. Unfortunately, Beyond the Sword doesn't address the somewhat cluttered interface that Civ IV had; in fact, it adds a bit more clutter with the event system, which pops up windows in the upper-right corner and logs them in a scrolling box at the top-center of your screen. Some of the clutter may still seem intimidating to beginners, but this expansion isn't necessarily for people who have never played Civ. And if you have, you shouldn't have many problems picking up the nuances of the interface, and you'll probably be too busy trying out all the new gameplay features that fundamentally change, and in some cases, revitalize, an already-classic game. Though not all of the additions in the expansion are perfect, there's plenty of new stuff in Beyond the Sword for Civ fans to play with, and plenty of reasons to dive back into the game and start taking "just one more turn" all over again.
By Andrew Park, GameSpot
Posted Jul 25, 2007 5:47 pm PT

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

If you took 2003's freely downloadable Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and mashed it together with the Battlefield games, you might come up with something like Quake Wars. Of course, the whole business of the original Enemy Territory's Allies and Axis have been replaced by the humans and Strogg from the Quake universe, but the basic nature of the gameplay is unchanged. Two opposing teams still duke it out while attempting to complete a series of objectives, though this time you can jump into a bunch of different vehicles and aircraft to carry out your assaults. The concept itself isn't really new, but it's put together extremely well, and its mission-focused gameplay will appeal to veterans of these types of shooters, as well as those who have previously been intimidated by them.

The year is 2065. The Strogg race has attacked Earth in order to process its raw materials into a fuel called stroyent. If you've played any other Quake titles, you'll know some of the history here, but it's mostly irrelevant in the context of Enemy Territory's multiplayer action, so let's cut to the chase: You join either the human Global Defense Force or the alien Strogg team, and then shoot your enemies in the face.
Obviously, it's a tad more complex than this. First, you need to choose one of five classes before each match. The GDF classes will be familiar to any RTCW: Enemy Territory player; the Strogg classes have different names than the human ones, but they all boil down to the same roles. GDF soldiers and Strogg aggressors are your typical frontline troops; medics and technicians heal in the field; and so on. Don't assume that correlating classes are all exactly the same, though. GDF field ops can drop ammo packs, for example. The similar Strogg oppressor doesn't need to drop ammo, since the alien weaponry doesn't require any. Instead, oppressors can set up a tactical shield to protect infantry or vehicles.
Other differences are subtle, but no less important. For example, GDF medics can revive downed teammates almost instantly, while it takes a few crucial seconds for Strogg technicians to do the same. On the other hand, technicians can use their healing stroyent tool on enemies, too, which creates a forward spawn point--a handy skill, indeed. Then you have GDF covert ops versus Strogg infiltrators. Both can disguise themselves as the enemy, but covert ops can use an explosive surveillance camera to spy on the opposition, while infiltrators can send out a handy drone to do battle with enemies from a distance. These differences aren't huge, but they give each faction a different feel and are balanced well.
Once you've spawned into the map, the game will give you incredibly clear objectives--and in most cases, more than one. Teams share a primary objective, and as the battle rages and one team is successful in meeting its current goal, the objective will shift. There are secondary missions to complete as well, and they will change depending on your class. You may need to take out enemy radar, heal teammates, blow up gates, and so on. The end result of this focus is that you never wonder what you should be doing, and even newcomers to this kind of action will feel that they contributed. Additionally, as you continue to play, you will earn medals and gain persistent ranks--provided you are playing on ranked servers. You'll also earn bonuses within your current campaign as you gain experience, such as improved weaponry, faster sprinting, and more, depending on the amount of XP earned and the class you are playing.
All the emphasis on missions results in intense firefights that occasionally involve Quake Wars' small assortment of vehicles and aircraft. The specific mission objectives usually keep the action contained to a few pockets of concentrated activity, though, so if you like the Battlefield formula of controlled chaos, you might miss the insane flurry of action coming at you from all sides and above. If you prefer to get comfy in a tank turret or in the cockpit of a chopper, you'll still be able to fulfill that role. But with objectives shifting from outdoor areas to indoor sewers and bunkers, you can't singularly focus on getting into the air or plowing down every enemy in sight. Don't take this to mean that Quake Wars doesn't offer its share of heavy action, however. You'll still get your fill of visceral, bloody battles--though they are usually confined to the ground.
You can also create a fire team as in the original Enemy Territory, so squad organization functionality is there, though it's not as necessary as you would expect. One reason is that when you undertake a secondary mission, you can see who is sharing it, thereby creating a sort of ad hoc squad. The other is that Quake Wars does not support voice chat, so you simply don't have the opportunity to issue commands to your fire team easily. Of course, you can use a third-party voice client, though that would have you chatting to all of your teammates, rather than a single squad. Now that the Battlefield series has set the squad-based chat standard, it's unclear why the functionality would be left out. The missions are so clear that your path is usually fairly straightforward, but if you're joining a random game and still want to contribute to the fullest extent, it would be nice for the game to give you the chance to talk to the other members of your fire team.
Shooting stuff in Quake Wars feels terrific. Both GDF and Strogg weaponry have the right weight and firing speed. Even the default weapons for nonassault classes, like the Strogg Lacerator, are effective in battle and handle well. Small details, such as the amount of time the barrels on the Hyperblaster rotate before they begin firing, feel properly balanced. Vehicles and aircraft are easy to manage as well. Oddly enough, though, some ground-movement controls are tied to flight and vehicle controls, so if, for example, you want to change the key binding for your Tormentor's thrust maneuver, you'll be changing the sprint key as well. It would be nice to have vehicle controls separately customizable from within the game, and we're at a loss to explain why players would be forced to edit configuration files to make such a simple, standard change.
There are three ways to play: on a single map, a three-map campaign that takes place across a single continent, or in a two-round duel on a single map in which teams compete to see who can complete their assault faster. There are 12 maps in all, and they hold up to 32 players at a time--though every server we have seen supports no more than 24 players. Most of the usual near-future environments are covered, from cratered wastelands to frozen tundra. The maps themselves are balanced well, with plenty of buildings for cover, and lots of hills and valleys to mix things up.

Yet prior Quake games captured the aura of futuristic warfare better than Quake Wars does. That is partially due to the open-environment design--and the very nature of the setting. However, there is no real eye candy to set your sights on here, so while the maps look very good, nothing really paints a detailed picture of a war-torn world. Indoor areas in particular are mostly bland and functional, but even terrain lacks detail, thanks to flat textures. Even explosions and fire effects lack pizzazz. Lighting is often spectacular, however, especially in the foliage-rich areas, and vehicles and turrets are richly detailed. The draw distance is also incredible, without any noticeable fog or polygon pop-in. Character models are good too, but the animations are a bit awkward. Luckily, the game runs reasonably well. The din of battle sounds good, and the weapons are obnoxiously loud, in a good way. The voice-over commands that you can play are grating, though, and the tone of some of the lines (like the GDF's snotty "You're Welcome!") seems out of place.
If you're an Enemy Territory veteran, this is the logical next step for you. And if you've been turned off by team shooters in the past, this one may change your mind. The accessible, objective-focused gameplay won't be for everyone, especially those into the chaotic, freeform warfare of other team shooters. But all told, Quake Wars is great fun and should provide FPS fans with a lot to sink their teeth into.
By Kevin VanOrd, GameSpot
Posted Sep 28, 2007 6:09 pm PT

World in Conflict

It goes without saying that it's a good thing World War III didn't erupt between the United States and the now-defunct Soviet Union. For many of us who were children during the Cold War, the fear of being annihilated in a nuclear conflict was very real. So it's a bit strange now that we can look back at that era and have the luxury of imagining what could have been. Or we can play World in Conflict, Sierra and Massive Entertainment's incredible new real-time strategy game. This isn't your standard RTS game, as World in Conflict doesn't follow the familiar model of resource gathering, base building, and swarming armies. Instead, it feels almost like an action game masquerading as a strategy game, and it offers up a relentlessly fun and amazing new approach to the genre, one that works in single-player and even more so in multiplayer.






World in Conflict is set in an alternate-history version of 1989. Instead of the Berlin Wall falling and communism collapsing, the Soviet Union launches an assault on Western Europe, and the United States rushes its forces in to aid its Western allies. Four months into the conflict, after the US Navy has been attrited down, the USSR launches a surprise invasion in Seattle and pushes inland. In the 14-mission single-player campaign, you play as a company commander who is part of the meager US defense; there is no campaign from the Soviet perspective, though you can play as the Red Army in multiplayer. However, the campaign twists and weaves, letting you experience a sample of the European conflict, battle in remote areas of the Soviet Union, and bring the fight to New York City.
Yes, the story is a bit far-fetched, but World in Conflict does a great job of making the implausible seem believable. That's partly due to the excellent storytelling, which is spearheaded by pitch-perfect narrator Alec Baldwin. He's backed up by a great voice acting cast that brings the principle and secondary characters to life, along with a story that offers up emotional and sometimes humorous vignettes from a world at war. For instance, you'll hear a soldier's futile battle against Army bureaucracy, the phone conversation of a husband and wife, and the deliberations of the president and his top military advisors. While there's a small misstep or two, such as a gospel song in the weirdest of places, the game effectively tugs at your heartstrings, which is rare for a strategy game, especially when it concerns the fate of one character whom you presume to be entirely one-dimensional but isn't. Some of these vignettes are conveyed through in-game cutscenes, while others are delivered through graphic-novel-style drawings. World in Conflict also features some incredible prerendered cutscenes that are so good you actually wish there were more of them.
This isn't a hardcore wargame or simulation. There are far too many gameplay abstractions for that, from being able to air-drop reinforcements on the battlefield within seconds to repairing equipment almost instantly. Instead, World in Conflict is thrilling game about destruction. You get to unleash all the firepower of modern military units on an open battlefield, but you also get to experience the challenges of combined arms warfare. That's because the game has a great rock-paper-scissors combat system that captures the vicious circle of war. Tanks can kill tanks and other vehicles well, but aren't so good against infantry. Artillery can kill infantry easily, but aren't so good against tanks. Helicopters can knock out vehicles well, but are vulnerable to infantry and antiaircraft units. It's a constant chess match about what you need to bring to battle and how you use it. The game is also smart enough to limit the number of units you can control. Instead of commanding the entire battlefield, you'll have only a relative handful of units. This makes managing your units a lot easier, like when employing their secondary abilities such as popping smoke grenades to create cover when under attack.







Then there's the game's excellent resource system. You're given a pool of reinforcement points that you can use to purchase units. Naturally, the powerful units cost a lot more than weaker ones, so you've got to choose quantity over quality. But it goes a bit deeper than that, as different classes of units have different abilities. For instance, light helicopters are some of the best scouts in the game, able to locate enemies from a distance, but they're extremely vulnerable. Medium helicopters are able to shoot down other helicopters with their air-to-air missiles, but they don't do a lot of damage to armor. Heavy helicopters can eat tanks for breakfast, but aren't effective against other helicopters. So while your initial inclination might be to load up on heavy choppers and go after enemy armor, a wise player recognizes that there are many roles to play on the battlefield. If your units are destroyed, their cost is slowly refunded back into your reinforcement pool, so you can order up replacements, although veteran units are more effective, giving you an incentive to keep your experienced units alive as long as possible.
The nice thing about this system is that it effectively gives you an unlimited number or resources and units to work with, so it's fairly forgiving to nontraditional strategy gamers. If that seems a bit easy, don't worry, because World in Conflict can also ratchet up the pressure by tossing in time limits. For instance, you might have to seize a town in less than 45 minutes, or achieve another objective in far less time. The margins for error are much smaller when you're working under a deadline.





Aside from reinforcement points, the only other resource in the game is tactical aid points, which are accumulated whenever you perform a vital role on the battlefield. You earn points by killing the enemy, but you also earn points by seizing and fortifying objectives, repairing friendly vehicles, transporting infantry around the battlefield, and so on. Tactical aid is like the icing on the cake, because you can use these points to purchase all sorts of powerful and utterly cool things. You can call in air strikes, napalm strikes, cluster bombers, mortar barrages, artillery barrages, chemical warfare, airborne reinforcements, precision artillery, fighter cover, and much more. The ultimate tactical aid is also the most awesome one: tactical nuclear weapons. World in Conflict features the best-looking mushroom clouds in gaming, and when they go off the screen flashes white and you hear the high-pitched sound of electronics frying. It's essentially the chilling sound of death.




All of this takes place on large, dynamic battlefields that come alive with the symphony of destruction. Thankfully, there's barely any worry about collateral damage in the game, so if you have to destroy a city to save it, then don't worry about the insurance bill. The destruction isn't just cosmetic, either. There can be all sorts of tactical implications. Take out a bridge and you force the enemy to go the long way around, or, in a multiplayer game, to call in a tactical aid to erect a new one. If the enemy is hiding infantry in woods and buildings, making them hard to root out, call in napalm and just burn down the trees or use artillery or smart bombs to blow up the structures. Everything blows up so beautifully that there's no such thing as overkill anymore. The game looks spectacular in DirectX 9, and it's noticeably better in DirectX 10 thanks to more atmospheric lighting. If you only have a DX9 card, though, don't worry--you aren't missing out on any gameplay enhancements aside from the ability to use dual-monitor support in multiplayer games.
Pretty much everything in the game looks good, even up close. Move the camera low to the ground and you can make out all the gear on your individual soldiers. Pull the camera back and you can soak in vast landscapes. One thing the game does especially well is smoke. Drop a smart bomb on a building and it will not only explode in thousands of pieces, but it will send convincing pillars of black smoke skyward. After a heavy battle, the sky will turn black because there's so much smoke in the air. That's the incredible level of detail in this game.
As good as the single-player campaign is, though, it pales in comparison to the multiplayer game, which is fast-paced and wonderfully balanced. Imagine the first-person multiplayer action game Battlefield 2 reborn as a real-time strategy game, and you have an inkling of how World in Conflict unfolds online. This is an insanely fun multiplayer game that lets you be part of a team of eight as you attempt to destroy the enemy using teamwork and every tactical weapon in the book.
Everything about multiplayer is designed to get you in a game quickly and keep you there for hours on end. First, when you join a server there's no wait for the current game to wrap up before you can get into the fight. If there's a spot open on the server, you're deposited into the middle of the current battle when you join. Second, there's no downtime at all. In most RTS games, you spend the first several minutes hurriedly trying to gather resources and build a base and units. In World in Conflict, you order up your first set of troops and watch them parachute or airdrop in seconds later. Fighting unfolds within the first minute of each game, and it doesn't stop until the very end. Third, thanks to the resource system, if your units are wiped out you can order up some more and be back fighting within seconds.



Team coordination can be handled through a built-in menu system or, even better, the built-in voice-over-IP chat system that lets you communicate vocally with your teammates. All you need is a microphone. Playing in a relatively uncoordinated manner is still a blast, but if you play on a good team against another coordinated team, the gameplay elevates to a whole new level. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat (or vice versa) in intense matches where both teams are hurling all on the battlefield, from air strikes, artillery, multiple tactical nukes, and more. There's nothing quite more urgent than a team desperately trying to cobble together enough tactical aid points for a last-ditch nuke.
Developer Massive Entertainment has been making real-time strategy games for almost a decade now, but World in Conflict is undoubtedly the studio's masterwork. Everything about this game is top-notch, from the addicting gameplay to the amazing visuals. More importantly, World in Conflict offers up a refreshingly new approach to strategy gaming. So if you're a strategy fan, you should definitely try World in Conflict. And even if you're turned off by standard real-time strategy games, you owe it to yourself to try out what Massive has come up with in this exquisite package.

BioShock

While on the surface it might look like little more than a very pretty first-person shooter, BioShock is much, much more than that. Sure, the action is fine, but its primary focus is its story, a sci-fi mystery that manages to feel retro and futuristic at the same time, and its characters, who convey most of the story via radio transmissions and audio logs that you're constantly stumbling upon as you wander around. All of it blends together to form a rich, interesting world that sucks you in right away and won't let go until you've figured out what, exactly, is going on in the undersea city of Rapture.

BioShock opens with a bang, but the overall plot focuses more on making an emotional impact than an explosive one. The year is 1960, and you're flying over the Atlantic Ocean. One mysterious plane crash later, you're floating in the water, apparently the lone survivor, surrounded by the flaming wreckage of the aircraft. But there's a lighthouse on a tiny island just at the edge of your view. Who in their right mind would put a lighthouse this far out? You swim closer and discover a small submersible called a bathysphere waiting to take you underwater. After catching a breathtaking view of what's below, you're sent into the secret underwater city of Rapture. Masterminded by a somewhat megalomaniacal businessman named Andrew Ryan, this city is driven by its own idea of total freedom, with capitalism completely unhindered by governmental meddling and science unhinged from the pesky morals of organized religion. Sounds like the perfect society, right? Well, even before you step out of your bathysphere and into the city, it becomes obvious that everything has gone horribly wrong down here. The city is trashed, and genetic freaks called splicers roam around, attacking anything that gets in front of them. At the heart of the matter is a powerful, corrupting substance called ADAM, which makes all this genetic tinkering possible and allows you to get your first plasmid power, the ability to shoot lightning out of your fingertips.
Character customization is a key trait in BioShock. You have a limited but increasable number of spaces in various customization categories, and you can totally reconfigure all of your different plasmids and tonics at will, at no charge, at specific locations in-game. Plasmids are the active, weaponlike genetic enhancement. Many of these are very straightforward. Incinerate lets you burn things and melt ice. Telekinesis lets you use your left hand as if it were Half-Life 2's gravity gun. But others are a little more subversive. Security bullseye is a little ball you can toss at enemies, causing any nearby security cameras, turrets, or sentry bots to point in his direction. Enrage can cause enemies to fight one another. Insect swarm causes your arm to shoot bees at your enemies, which unfortunately is far less cool-looking than it sounds. You can also place decoys, plant swirling wind traps for enemies, and so on. While it's fun to mess around with a lot of the indirect attacks, facing your enemies head-on with the more direct plasmids feels a bit more effective.
Tonics are skills that are slotted just like plasmids, but they have passive effects, like sportboost, which increases your movement and melee attack speed, or natural camouflage, which makes you turn invisible if you stand still for a few seconds. So if you want to make your swinging wrench attacks more powerful, you can slot up things like wrench jockey and wrench lurker, which increase your wrench damage on all attacks and when catching opponents off-guard, respectively. Add bloodlust, which gives you some health back every time you club someone with your wrench, and you're a melee master with health and plasmid energy (called EVE) to spare. You can also slot some defensive stuff, like static field, which zaps anyone who touches you with a electric radius effect, and armored shell, which reduces the damage you take from physical attacks. There are more than 50 tonics to collect, giving you plenty of options to play around with.

Most of those plasmids and tonics will have to be purchased using the raw ADAM that you collect from harvesting vessels called little sisters. They're little girls with a big needle that they use to collect the sought-after stuff from dead bodies, and they're protected by the baddest enemies in the entire game, hulking armored monsters called big daddies. This is where the game makes you decide to be selfless or selfish. If you harvest the girls, they die, but you get 160 ADAM from them. If you free them and return them to normal, you get only 80 ADAM. There are a limited number of girls to deal with in the entire game, making it very possible that you won't be able to collect every single purchasable plasmid and tonic, so choose wisely. Either route has benefits and consequences, and there are story considerations as well.
Before you start thinking this is some kind of role-playing game or something, let's stop right here and say that in addition to all the toys that plasmids and tonics for you to play around with, you're also going to be carrying around some more conventional firepower. Your melee weapon is a wrench, and you quickly collect a pistol and machine gun. Being that this is 1960 filtered through the isolation of an undersea world that has the art deco style of the first half of the century, the weapons aren't nearly as high-tech as the genetic code in your body. The machine gun is your basic tommy gun, and the grenade launcher appears to have been cobbled together from coffee cans and other spare parts. You'll also get a shotgun, a crossbow, and so on. You can also collect different types of ammunition, such as exploding buckshot for your shotgun or missiles for your grenade launcher, and upgrades that increase damage, speed up reloads, and so on. The weapons are functional and the upgrades are pretty good, but the firing action isn't nearly as exciting as a combat-focused first-person shooter would be. The weapons are loud but don't feel especially right, and seeing shotgun blasts not even do 50 percent damage to an unarmored human target (on the default difficulty setting) just feels wrong. But that might also say something about the general lack of enemy variety.

There are five types of splicers to deal with, and these are your primary enemies. The splicers are humans who have messed around with ADAM too much and have essentially lost their minds. Now they wander around the city like junkies in need of a fix. The only real difference among them is what they're carrying. Leadheads have guns, thugs have blunt objects, nitros toss explosives, Houdini splicers can teleport and shoot fireballs, and spider splicers can crawl on ceilings and toss hooks at you. As you go through the game, they get tougher to kill, but there's no real visual indicator as to why that's so, leading to some of the weapons feeling a bit weak. Headshots simply shift from killing enemies immediately to not killing enemies immediately. This makes smart use of a combination of plasmids and conventional weapons the best tactic, though even those tactics don't involve much. The same one-two punch of shocking enemies to stun them and following up with a whack with the wrench is a perfectly viable tactic throughout the entire game, depending on how you've placed your tonics.


You'll find more important human characters at certain points in the story, and though these are set up like boss fights, these guys are just more powerful and resilient versions of existing splicers. You'll also have to deal with security robots, turrets, and cameras, though these can all be hacked via a neat little hacking minigame to bring them over to your side, allowing for more indirect combat options.
Then there's the big daddy, which comes in two configurations. The bouncer has a huge drill arm that is used to, you know, drill into people. The rosie likes to launch explosives in your general direction. Both of them are fairly nasty, because they move quickly and dish out a lot of damage while not taking very much from most of your attacks. They protect the little sisters, who are invulnerable to your attacks and can only be dealt with once their protecting big daddy is dead. The big daddy is hardly unbeatable, though you may die a few times while facing your first few. Death in BioShock is barely even a setback. When you die, you're reconstituted at the nearest vita-chamber and sent on your way with your inventory intact and most of your health.
This isn't a reload, so everything is as you left it, even the damage that you've already done to any surviving enemies. So you can wear down a big daddy by just running at it again and again with little or no care for your health. That can get tedious, of course, but having that possibility is a blessing--and a curse. On one hand, you're free to try out new things, like plasmid and tonic combinations, with no penalty if you equip some bum techniques. On the other, there aren't any real gameplay consequences, so playing with skill isn't rewarded. You could fumble your way through the 15 or 20 hours it'll probably take to properly explore Rapture and still see everything there is to see. This, along with three selectable difficulty settings, leaves you with the impression that the game was made to cater to a wide audience, but the hard difficulty setting doesn't actually impact things like artificial intelligence or force you to play any more skillfully to succeed. The enemies still mostly run at you mindlessly while attacking, occasionally getting into scraps with one another or breaking off to find a healing machine, but they take longer to kill and hurt you more when they hit.
While the world of Rapture is rich and filled with interesting little tidbits, the game does a tight job of keeping you on track. Aside from two cases where you must collect a certain amount of specific items in order to proceed, you always know exactly what to do and where to go to do it, thanks to a handy map screen and an onscreen arrow that points you directly at the next objective. These helping hands feel almost a little too helpful, but in the event that you get really stuck, you'll appreciate the additional hint system that very plainly explains what you need to do and where you need to go to move forward.
You won't miss a ton of locations by sticking to exactly where the arrow points you, but the story fills out a lot more when you find and listen to as many audio diaries as possible. Hearing various characters talk about the problems leading up to Rapture's current disheveled state really fills in the blanks nicely and should be considered mandatory if you intend to play the game. Hearing the voices of these wide-eyed idealists as their world falls apart makes the whole game feel more human. Playing through without listening to any of these optional audio clips would make the game quiet and, actually, fairly confusing, as you'd be proceeding with no sense of backstory about Andrew Ryan, fish magnate Frank Fontaine, and the bit characters who comment on their increasingly hostile struggle.
It certainly helps that the environments you find throughout the game look amazing and practically beg to be explored. For something as potentially dingy as an underwater city, you sure do get a lot of different looks as you move along, from the boiler rooms and workshops of the city's core to the forest that helps keep the entire thing oxygenated. You'll also get a lot of great views of the sea through windows. In addition to a terrific artistic design that ties the visuals together, the game has a very strong technical side, provided you have a machine that's built enough to handle it. Unreal Engine 3 is under the hood, and all the requisite bells and whistles are along for the ride. If there's one thing you need to know about BioShock's graphics, it's that the water looks perfect. As an underwater city that's slowly falling apart, it's no surprise that you'll find plenty of leaks. Whether it's standing water on the floor or sea water rushing in after an explosion, it'll blow you away every time you see it.
But BioShock isn't without flaw. The game has been released with a host of technical issues, ranging from a total lack of audio on some machines to issues with the SecuROM online activation, which under normal circumstances is designed to prevent you from activating a retail copy on more than two machines. The game is also available through Steam, though all of the same audio stuttering and other issues that some players are experiencing in the disc-based version carry over to the digital version as well. While it's a sad truth that no game is ever released in a completely bug-free state for 100 percent of its users, these issues appear to be pretty widespread, and if you're at all skittish about waiting for a patch after you've purchased something, you might want to wait until at least one patch is released before buying BioShock. In our experience, we got the game running with some minor audio stuttering on a Windows XP PC, and can't get any audio at all on our Vista test machine. All of this makes the Xbox 360 version's stuttering issues (which seem to only happen on some consoles) pale in comparison.
Aside from having different technical problems, the differences between the Xbox 360 and PC versions of BioShock are fairly minor. The mouse and keyboard support works exactly as you'd expect, and using a mouse makes the combat a touch easier, since aiming for the head is usually easier with a mouse than with a gamepad. But if you're after that console-style gamepad experience, BioShock has full support for the wired Xbox 360 controller. If you're at a loss for which version to purchase, it comes down to the quality of your PC. If you're running a high-end DirectX 10 machine, the game looks better on the PC. It also has DirectX 9 support, and even running this way, it's possible for some facets of BioShock, like texture quality, to look sharper than the 360 version if your machine can handle it. But when you factor in the current bug list for each version, or if your PC isn't especially recent, the Xbox 360 version is a safer bet.

Electric buck in your shotgun makes the big daddies shimmy and shake.
In addition to some nice period music that plays from jukeboxes or record players, you'll get some terrific music that helps set the creepy, uncertain mood. The weapons sound good and loud, and everything else just sounds right. The voice acting, which you'll hear plenty of throughout the game from both living characters and their posthumous audio recordings, really brings the story together and helps give it all an emotional impact that most games lack. You'll also hear splicers mumbling, humming, and singing to themselves as they scavenge the environment, which helps give the game a creepy vibe. The quality and depth of things like this are what set BioShock apart from other games and make it something really special overall.
If you're the kind of player who just wants yet another action-packed shooter, BioShock probably isn't for you. Its weak link is its unsatisfying no-skill-required combat, which might aim this one just over the head of the average Halo fan. But if you want to get a little fancy, there's a lot of fun to be had with some of the game's more indirect fighting methods. It builds an amazing atmosphere by using terrific graphics and sound to set a creepy mood. But BioShock's real strengths are as a compelling work of interactive fiction, and as a unique ride through a warped world with some great payoff built into its mysterious plot. If that description has you even the least bit interested, you'll definitely find BioShock worth playing--but you still might want to hold off for a patch or two, just in case.
By Jeff Gerstmann, GameSpot
Posted Aug 22, 2007 4:23 pm PT