War on Terror review

“If you want to load this saved game, your campaign info will be overwrite with the saved at the same race. Do you want to load?”

That make you laugh? That’s actual in-game text, dear reader, presumably translated badly from the original German. So is this:

“Shattered Mirror

2 May 2008, Mexico City, Mexico

Leaded by unknown reasons, Cell N˚22 betray the Order in Mexico City. The Order High-Command has dispatch the closest Cell to eliminate the traitors before they would be able to annihilate their society with their learned knowledge.”

Well, reader old chum, at least your ‘learned knowledge’ now includes the whereabouts of Mexico City…

Broken Arrow

This game is fundamentally broken on so many levels it beggars belief. When it does work, War on Terror is a retro experience that will warm the hearts of Command & Conquer veterans everywhere. My advice to them is to go back to playing C&C and forget all about this sorry title.

The thing with review code is that you never quite know if what you have is the done deal. There’s a temptation to give excuses on behalf of publisher and developer and assume everything will be all right in the final release. Of course, bitter experience says that changes are only very, very rarely ever implemented ahead. So no mercy then, particularly as the otherwise barren forums on the game website have similar issues to those I had encountered raised therein.

The game crashed during both attempts to install it. On both occasions, Task Manager had to be used to kill the installer, and on both occasions the installer swallowed Task Manager, burped and continued. On the second attempt, the game actually ran. Shame.

The opening movie tries hard to be Black Hawk Down and is a largely nonsensical affair. At the end, an unarmed, un-armoured woman in a chopper (a journalist we discover) lands in the middle of a big fire fight and tries to save a comedy-waif (complete with soft toy for goodness sake!) from a squishy fate only for them both to be killed. Your heartstrings will be too busy chuckling to be plucked, despite the worthy gibberish being sonorously delivered by the voice over.

Zoom into the Future

In the game itself, the UN… sorry, the World Forces are battling mysterious terrorist group Al Q… sorry, the Order, assisted by the Chinese… sorry, the… oh yeah, the Chinese. It’s all set in 2008, presumably so as not to offend anyone (especially the Chinese and their huge gaming market). There are campaigns for each group, introduced by little movies, stills and briefings. From presentation to delivery, you’ve seen it all done before and done better.

To their credit, Monte Cristo has tried a new-ish thing. This is despite its stated intent to produce a game that met the standards of existing titles in the RTS genre – ten year old titles, presumably. The new-ish thing is the ability to zoom right into the battlefield and view things from the perspective of a large dog. Or, perhaps, a child with a soft toy. It’s an utterly useless new-ish thing as the graphics don’t reward the effort and the game is unplayable that close in.

Indeed, rather than allowing players to zoom in, it would have been better to allow them to zoom out enough to encompass all their units so as to be able to select them en-masse where necessary. If they are on a hill, you will find the view irritatingly inflexible in this regard.

Sticky Moments

That’s just one of the many bugs and bad decisions that get in the way of actually enjoying the game. The constantly nagging feeling of ‘been there, done that’ doesn’t help.

The way revived troops get stuck in the terrain, unable to stand and join in the fight (but able to get into vehicles only to fall over again when allowed out) will bug you, as they still count towards your total allowed units.

The way units can’t pass along some routes that are patently wide enough (the otherwise useless zoom helps confirm this), forcing you to go the long way around will drive you mad.

The way the main voice-over actress has tried to fix the scripts as she has recorded them, only for the broken originals to be displayed as she talks, will amuse you no end. She describes the tutorial level as being set during a beautiful, misty day, only for the player to find thick fog and pouring rain obscuring everything when the game starts.

No Competition

To compete in the RTS market place, the devil is in the detail. In War on Terror, the detail (along with a few of the bigger issues) lets the whole thing down badly. It has everything we’re used to seeing, including multiplayer and editor options, but so what if the game is basically broken?

The War on Terror is, at the higher levels, an often ill-targeted, badly planned and executed operation, designed at times to distract you from the real issues. So is the game, only without the chance for governments to bring in suspect legislation under the guise of protecting the public. At least in this case, you can protect yourself by not buying the game.

My name’s Ben Elton. Goodnight.