Order of War Preview

10 Aug 2009 at 16:34:56 by Tim McDonald

You know it's a World War II game already. Barring the article image, even - just by looking at the name you know it's a World War II game. Hell, you can probably tell it's a strategy game rather than a first-person shooter. I'm not quite sure why it is that World War 2 games inevitably use the word "of", but considering the history it's understandable why we try to put some honour in there and end up with titles like Men in a Band of Brothers in Arms in a Company Answering a Call of Duty at War are Heroes of Honour II: Electric Boogaloo.

I can only pray that one day they'll run out of names and we'll see a World War II strategy game called Men Without Hats, which will feature little people tripping over in fields.

Order of War has lots of people falling over in vast, vast fields, usually through gunshot wound - and when I say "lots of people" I mean it. This isn't Company of Heroes. You don't have a few small units of men and maybe, if you're very lucky, three or four tanks. A single selectable unit of tanks will usually comprise at minimum four of them. A unit of infantry might be twenty men strong. Generally speaking, you will have lots and lots of these units at your command.

This is war on the grand scale.

Amazingly, developer Wargaming.net has so far fulfilled its claim of making this an accessible RTS. The interface is simplified far beyond what you normally see, with toolbar controls simplified down to the contextual controls you can do with a two-button mouse. Move, attack, and garrison building make up the majority of it, with a small section of the screen listing your units, and two more offering reinforcements you can call in and special off-screen attacks like air-strikes or artillery barrages.

The campaign is even structured in such a way. A campaign mission will tend to focus on one large objective, with the one American mission focusing on conquering the town of Sainte-Mère-Église circa D-Day. While the mission on the whole might take 30 or 40 minutes, it's broken up into manageable ten-minute vignettes. Initially, you may just have a squad of paratroopers who need to secure a location. Then, a company of Allied tanks might roll in on the other side of the map, but anti-tank defences mean that a second group of paratroopers are needed to knock them out first. After that, a combined forced of tanks and infantry will perhaps assault a church, and once that's done you've surrounded the town itself and are poised for the attack proper.

Things are even kinder to the beginner player with a steady stream of reinforcements. If you lose too many troops, more will come in to reinforce you, with your bollocking from the higher-ups gradually getting more and more vitriolic. Assuming you're not going to burst into tears at being told you're an idiot by a computer, though, this means that it's generally quite tricky to lose a mission without actively trying.

Tamer spent a lot of time talking about the campaign and the way that's handled in our last preview, so let's chat about Skirmish instead.

In the preview build this is a simple 1v1 and is, initially at least, comfortable and familiar. Starting with one control point and a few units, your aim is to eliminate your opponent. Owning a control point grants you a stream of reinforcement points, used for the aforementioned off-screen attacks and for calling in more troops. Fortunately, the possibility of straying into an unwinnable position when your opponent controls most of the points is largely removed through effective counters.

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