WarGames
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
A real-time strategy game based on Wargames? As in the 15-year-old Matthew Broderick movie? Yeah, that was my reaction too.
- GamePro Score
- User Score
- Write your review!
This 3D C&C variant is set 20 years after the events in the 1983 movie, in which a young hacker in search of a game almost ignites World War III by setting off a nuclear simulation on NORAD�s WOPR computer. In the interim, the WOPR has decided that nuclear war�s unlikely�I�m sure India and Pakistan will be happy to hear that�and decides to use conventional means to destroy mankind�s capability to wage war.
How exactly the WOPR brings this off I�m sure I don�t know�last I noticed, the computer was stuck in a room at NORAD. At any rate, that�s the explanation, and here�s the war: You take either NORAD�s human or WOPR�s robotic forces through a 15-mission campaign in third-person 3D. The game also offers the full complement of multiplayer options.
You do the usual real-time strategy stuff with a few twists. One is hacking by sending special units into key structures. It�s more or less the equivalent of research. Among other things, it�s the way you earn most of the money to erect buildings, buy units, gain intelligence, and enhance your units� performance and degrade your enemies�. A Defcon register, complete with Klaxon, gives you a general sense of your progress.
You�ll find plenty of land, sea, and air units (around 30 per side) judiciously spread throughout the body of the game. By itself, that�s enticement to keep playing: I want to see that battleship.
The real attraction, though, is the rotatable 3D game-world. It�s unlike any I�ve seen since Myth. With the angled-down view zoomed-in so a snow-burdened pine tree is half the height of the screen, a sea of view-obscuring fog all around, and a mission map that tells you you�re right on top of a still-invisible enemy, WarGames becomes intimate, tense, almost frightening. The Big Picture suddenly doesn�t matter; there�s only The Moment. For a purely RTS game, that�s a genuine achievement.
Now, it does need fine-tuning. The pathfinding is mediocre: Units asked to find their way across more than a modest distance not only fail to follow optimal routes, but also often find themselves stopped dead by terrain or other units they bumped into en route. Occasionally, they even go off in entirely the wrong direction. The explosions have little variety�blowing up a simple guardhouse produces the same fireworks and animation as destroying a command center. The sound effects seem incomplete, and the environment, while pretty, is comparatively static. Water doesn�t flow. Houses don�t burn. Hillsides don�t crater.
The missions I played tended to be rather linear (though not as linear as the in-mission emails from WarGames characters would sometimes suggest). And the AI is a mixed bag. It�s pretty solid defensively and does pull off some clever moves on the attack�for example, calling in a specialized unit that can fire from outside a troublesome defender�s range. But it often falls prey to classic real-time AI foibles like sending forces into action piecemeal and attacking on only one front.
And, yeah, the premise still seems silly. (C�mon: A Wargames game ought to be a nuclear-war sim!) But with or without the movie baggage, WarGames is a pleasant surprise.
