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.