As the game opens, you are flying over Seattle's harbor in a helicopter, the battle is erupting beneath you, and you need to take the two tanks you're given and secure a perimeter to help out soldiers stranded there. This is a fairly simple task to complete, but unfortunately the games control scheme is rather unforgiving. Massive decided to use a non-standard Real Time Strategy control scheme, and go towards a more First Person Shooter slant. You move the camera just as you would in any typical shooter. W, A, S and D keys move you forward, left, back and right, as opposed to sliding your cursor to the edge of the screen, which actually spins the camera on its axis. This can lead to some awkward and difficult moments as you try to maneuver the camera to the proper position, or worse, as you try to send units to critical points on the playing field.

Even the tutorial, which is designed to help you familiarize yourself with the controls, is less then helpful and often quite awkward itself. After playing through the first few missions, I have adjusted to the controls somewhat, but it still does not feel as natural as Company of Heroes or other games with more standardized control sets. This severely hampers WiC, because you spend more time familiarizing yourself with the controls than playing the game. The whole point of strategy games is to have full control at your fingertips, and you don't quite get that feeling from WiC.

The gameplay otherwise is straight forward. The tanks you start with will slowly allow you to acquire more units as you capture the points you're instructed to. As you capture a landing zone, more reinforcements will be air lifted to your location, and you will be given control. If a unit dies, another is dispersed to your previous landing zone. This is part of the problem. It makes it feel as if there's no real penalty for losing one of your tanks. If you do, another will magically appear at your previous LZ, at no cost to you. So the game quickly falls more in to tedium then fun.

One of the features that really stood out for me was how clean and kempt the User Interface is. There's plenty of room to see your battlefield, as most all the UI is tucked away, in convenient, expandable menus. It is incredibly easy to deploy artillery strikes with just a couple of clicks, and summon reinforcements with little effort. This is very key, considering you're going to repeat these tasks frequently for a good portion of the game. In a market where UI's are becoming more and more cluttered, it's nice to see that Massive has taken steps to make the game easy to manage.

The multiplayer aspect of WiC is very straight forward. You play as either NATO forces, or USSR. There are three basic multiplayer game types: Domination, Assault and Tug-of- War, and they all play exactly like they sound, and none of them are particularly interesting.

Domination rounds give you a set of points to capture, and four types of units to do it with: Infantry, Repair, Airborne, and Land Base. You decide which type of unit to use, and begin an endless cycle of calling for reinforcements. You then move these units with a partner, or alone, to take the points one by one. The player with the most strategic points by the end of the round is the winner. The mode is very straightforward, easy to pick up, and, if you have a good teammate, easy to run through quickly.

Assault rounds are slightly different. Each team takes one turn attacking and one turn defending a given map, which consists yet again of more strategic points. You attack each point until your group of units, which were again selected at the beginning of the round, have captured them all. Then the roles reverse and your team attempts to defend said points from an attacking enemy.

Tug-of-War rounds are also strikingly similar to the other modes; the same unit choice starts you off, and you fight for a series of locations, until you have captured them all, and your opponents lose, or you crumble in defeat. I could see this mode becoming a bit trickier if they actually gave you any resources to work with, but playing with a set like the Land Based attacks of tanks, give you a maximum of maybe ten units to toy with at any one time, and that makes it kind of dull. If you could have twenty or thirty units rolling around against a big group of enemy units, actually vying for position, this would be intensely entertaining. As it stands currently, all the multiplayer modes play in much the same way, with subtle layout differences.

Thus presents the problem of WiC's multiplayer. It isn't that it's not enjoyable, because despite my negative review, I did have a bit of fun with the game. The problem is that Massive named the same game mode three times, altered it almost unnoticeably and then sent it out the door. This doesn't work for me. When I hear about 3 different modes, I expect three different modes. When I reviewed this game, we set up a multiplayer server on a Local Network, and chose one map from each game type for one of our games, and started. If between every match a large screen hadn't come up and told me the mode had changed, I would have never been able to tell the difference.