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Will of Steel

Score: 57%
ESRB: Teen
Publisher: Trisynergy
Developer: Gameyus
Media: CD/1
Players: 1
Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Graphics & Sound:

Will of Steel is a beautiful game, but the old adage that beauty is only skin deep couldn’t have been proved more true by anything else, including supermodels. Though most of the game takes place in the arid landscapes of Iraq and Afghanistan, the urban settings that occasionally populate the maps are well laid out and very detailed. The units themselves have great animations, textures, and are just dang pleasing to look at. You have to have a high end machine to run this game though, and don’t trust the box; the minimum specs on it are a lie.

The sound is the first indication of a downward slope in terms of quality. The voices are pretty good, as the infantry dialogue has style and will remind you of the old Command & Conquer games. The sound effects, however, sound like they’ve been recorded straight from toy guns (the ones that have that long, looping track of alarms, bombs, and machine gun fire going off). The music is far, far worse; what can only be described as some of the worst hard rock ever blares out as you go into combat. WOS may be good to the eyes, but it’s torture to the ears.


Gameplay:

Will of Steel is a cookie cutter RTS done very poorly. It strives for reality, but fails miserably. As a Marine commander in Iraq, and later Afghanistan, you are given set amounts of infantry, tanks, and helicopters at the beginning of each mission. Invariably your task is to wipe out everything that moves. Little thought went into the mission goals, and these same objectives drag on and on as you go through the game.

There are a wide variety of units that you can command. Basic infantry and tanks are what you start out with, but later on you get to command special forces, engineers, APCs, and various types of attack copters. You can even get special abilities like artillery strikes and satellite reconnaissance. Though the equipment is real, the reality factor is hurt even more by the way damage is handled. Units are relatively weak to enemy fire compared to other RTS games, and you will find that your tanks can and will be destroyed by a single guy with an AK-47.

The least convincing part about WOS is the A.I. This is some of the worst pathfinding in the history of games. You may even want to pick up a copy just so you can own a piece of history. Any order you issue to a group of two or more units is hardly ever carried out; units can get hung up in bottlenecks, on various pieces of terrain (cars, buildings, small rocks, etc.), and even each other. They stick to things like glue, and you have to work hard to get them out of the mess.

Things get worse when the enemy shows up. Target priority is a joke; tanks fire salvos at infantry when they are being pummeled by another enemy tank. Your units’ actions of self preservation are also not quite up to snuff here. Tanks tend to sit still and wait to die as the aforementioned man with an AK proceeds to shoot them to death.

WOS only has 16 missions and no Multiplayer mode to speak of. There isn’t much substance here besides the well laid out maps. Battles in the open desert with little cover could have been exciting, but the game plays so poorly that it’s hard to get a good experience out of it. Likewise, the urban firefights that spark up aren’t helped out much by the way things play out. It would have been fun trying to develop desert and urban tactics and use them in conjunction with each other in the missions, but the level design just doesn’t have the support it needs from the gameplay.


Difficulty:

Will of Steel is a difficult game to play. Not because it’s confusing in any way or because it’s laid out poorly. It’s difficult because there is no instruction book, no tutorial, and because of all the problems mentioned earlier, along with the ones that have yet to be mentioned. The enemy A.I. isn’t quite the genius hive mind either. They get stuck as easily as your troops do. But the bad damage system along with the pathfinding problems make WOS more of a chore than a challenge.

Game Mechanics:

If the gameplay wasn’t bad enough, interface problems run rampant in Will of Steel as well. The area of detection on the mouse cursor seems smaller than the cursor image. This becomes a problem when you try to select infantry, as they are pretty small on the screen. The camera could also use some refining; if it could be zoomed out a little bit more, it would have been perfect. As it is, things are a bit too up-close and personal on the screen.

This is where the little things kill the game. Various interface bugs make navigating the menus and issuing orders to troops more frustrating than it should be. The Fog of War also seems to be broken, as troops shoot at enemies that are covered by it. There is an option to use voice control to give orders, but without any directions on how it works (trial and error did little to help), it became a bit of a problem to use. I found a few command words online and tried them, but sometimes saying one thing to select a certain type of troop would select an entirely different unit. The voice control is a good idea to help those who hate hotkeys, but executed rather poorly here.

Will of Steel is one of the best looking and worst playing real-time strategy games out there. It seems strange that the developers had the skill to harness so much graphical power, yet didn’t have the foresight to smooth out all of the extremely rough edges that plague this game. But alas, great looking crap games are the new fad these days. Even if you’re a die-hard military RTS fan, be very wary when deciding to purchase Will of Steel.


-Snow Chainz, GameVortex Communications
AKA Andrew Horwitz

Minimum System Requirements:



1 GHz Processor, 256 MB RAM, 32 MB Video Card
 

Test System:



Windows XP, 1.4GHz AMD Athlon, GeForce FX 128 MB video card, 40 gig hard drive, 56X CD-ROM, 256MB DDR Ram, Sound Blaster Live! sound card, Cable Modem Internet connection

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