And the missions, while varied, are nothing a veteran hasn't seen before. There's an interesting plotline, alternate campaigns, and a slight adventure-game feel to the game, but for the most part
Original War walks the straight-and-narrow when it comes to innovation, and it suffers for it.
The story is surprisingly strong. A material is found that is the basis for cold fusion. Unfortunately, that material is buried deep in Siberia. A time-travel device is also found, and the US decides to use the device, go back in time two million years, and transplant the syberite into Alaska (going over the land-bridge) so that it's there instead of in Russian territory. Of course, quickly things go vastly awry, with Russians from an alternate history and even more coming in to play as the game progresses. From the start, you can choose the American or Russian campaigns, although it is suggested to start with the American ones.
The core gameplay is strictly by-the-books real-time strategy. You maneuver your units around the map, fire upon your enemies, build entrenchments and the like. There are no production facilities, so you won't be building grunts to go into combat--you get the characters the game provides you, and if you lose them then they're gone. There are three 'health' settings for the characters: when they're in the green, they slowly but surely heal themselves; when their health bar is yellow, they don't heal but don't lose health either; when their bar is red, they're unconscious and going fast, and you have to get a medic to them quick or they will die.
There are four jobs that your characters can be, and they can switch between them freely. You can have soldiers, who do the brunt of the fighting; engineers, who build structures and move wares; mechanics, who deal with vehicles found in the past; and scientists, who heal characters and do research. Each character has experience in particular fields, and they can gain experience in the rest both by using the skills in-game and by end-of-mission rewards. The system actually works fairly nicely, although as usual the restrictions imposed by the RTS engine are nonsensical--why can only soldiers crawl? Why can only engineers cart material? But it works for balancing the game.
Other than that, it plays straight-and-narrow. There are times in the missions where you are presented with options; almost invariably, there's one correct option and a number of worse choices. Sometimes these bad choices even end the game for you. Meep. Saving becomes important, because you don't want to get screwed with a bad choice, but usually there's a pretty obvious one that leads towards progressing in the game.
The game also sports multiplayer, although you'll be lucky to find people playing the game online.
