The game itself though, is not a true real time strategy game. Perhaps it's just the strategy purist in me, but when I think of this genre, I think of heavy hitters like Starcraft, Warcraft, Total Annihilation, and more currently Dawn of War, Company of Heroes and even Supreme Commander. These games present you with the ability to amass and army of more than five units, study your playing field, and choose the most advantageous method of attack to defeat your enemy. What Massive has produced, on the other hand, is more of a simulation strategy. Instead of allowing you to play the game however you please, they send you from objective to objective, until the level is complete, and then resets the whole process until the game is finished. It's more repetition then strategy.

I know this game has gotten a ton of praise from every possible reviewer, but I have a hard time giving a game blind praise because the graphics are pretty (which they most certainly are) or they add supposed "innovation" to a type of gaming by more or less taking all the rules of Real Time Strategy and throwing them out the window. I guess what it all boils down to is that I'm disappointed. I'm disappointed that a game which oozed with potential and with such promise of immersive, realistic and destructive strategy game play, boiled down to nothing more than a rather visually stimulating way for me to take orders from my computer.

In a market that is already flooded with one World War II game after another, there was a lot of promise in a game that attempts to shake the mold. Sadly Massive fell short of that goal. Beautiful graphics and a unique twist on an over done genre can't do enough to make up for the game's shortcomings. When World in Conflict shines, it shows what the future of strategy games may hold, but it fails, well, massively, in a number of ways. I'll be impressed to see where Massive and other developers take what is clearly an amazing game engine. Here's hoping that their next "strategy" game is actually a real one.