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Act of War: Direct Action

For a decade, game developers have spent tens of millions of dollars in the pursuit of creating the most realistic worlds for us to play in. With every passing generation of hardware technology we get more realistic modeling, smoother, more lifelike animation, and realistic physics built into our games to enhance our experience. Artists slave over game cutscenes to make them look as close to lifelike as we’ve ever seen.

In Act of War: Direct Action for the PC, Atari and developer Eugen Systems decided to take a novel route, one that’s both effective and light on the budget. Real, live actors.

Fine, fine, it’s not a new approach. Strategy gamers will immediately point out the campy cutscenes injected into the campaigns of Command and Conquer. But where Westwood played out those scenes with the utmost of silliness, Act of War: Direct Action actually makes it work. You get the feeling as the game unfolds, that you’re watching real news reports of a wave of military chaos sweeping across the United States.

Act of War takes its premise from the simple question, “What would happen to the Western world if gas prices hit $8.25 per gallon?” It carries the War on Terror to direct attacks on the U.S. energy infrastructure, and watches through the lens of a 3D RTS wargame. Three armies will clash against the backdrop of a nation that’s becoming a bit crazy in the head parts. Riots break out across the land. Shadowy figures manipulate the supply, raking in the profits and killing off their competitors, figuratively and literally.

It’s actually an interesting little story the game tells, if a bit stunted. It starts strong, grabbing onto you before you even launch the game for the first time, a lengthy “interview” segment setting up the game’s plot immediately after the game installs. I can’t remember another game that has used this technique, and it roped me in nicely.

The actors, be they a few in number or gathered in a large mob, hold their parts well, though one or two of them break down into hysterically bad lines later in the game. The live-action cutscenes are occasionally overlayed with a little bit of CG (unless Atari has been spending their remaining warchest on transport helicopters), basically bridging the real-world elements with the future-tech military hardware players control once in the actual game. Those moments never look quite right, but it doesn’t detract from the presentation too much.

Act of War: Direct Action’s single player campaign does what any good RTS campaign does: it gets to the point, teaches you how to play the game, then steps out of the way, sending you on to the Skirmish and online Multiplayer modes. Clocking in at around a dozen missions, it presents a smooth, simple learning curve, teaching you all about troop movement, resource collection, building bases, calling in air strikes, and capturing and holding buildings and prisoners. More could have probably been done to teach the intricacies of the camera and unit control. There are a ton of details to be found in the game’s well-organized and jam-packed manual.

Act of War operates on a basic unlimited resource model, where derricks are set up on oil deposits, with vulnerable tanker trucks creating a supply line to your refineries. As a new and interesting source of income, enemy soldiers can be cuffed and captured in the field. You’ll receive a reward for each combatant nabbed, and can also build P.O.W. interrogation centers that can hold a certain number of prisoners. Those centers generate a steady income stream that increases as you fill them up.

Three sides are playable in Skirmish and Multiplayer modes: The U.S. Army is built of the familiar, current-era units you’re used to seeing in modern military games. They rely heavily on different infantry units for different jobs, but are backed up by strong and varied armor and air divisions. Task Force Talon is a special hi-tech force comprised of units from all branches of the military and placed under direct control of the White House. From this division, you’ll see more unmanned drones with customizable loadouts of weaponry, depending on what the situation on the ground calls for. They’re laden with all sorts of research upgrades that gradually build them into a powerful force while performing dirty little tricks like hacking an enemy’s bank account and crippling their resource stream. Finally, there’s the Consortium, a shadowy militant group that relies on stealth and covert action, but in truth… well, I won’t ruin the surprise here.

The game looks nice, if not spectacular. Urban areas are highly detailed, and the destructible buildings crumble and collapse impressively. Fires send plumes of smoke up into the camera, occasionally obscuring it and throwing the whole scene into confusion. That’s a fine thing for dramatic effect, but circling the camera around to find your troops can be tedious sometimes, particularly when they don’t always stand out against the scenery. When zoomed in, the units look fairly blocky.

On the AI front, the game does run into a few problems. The enemy AI doesn’t always behave very intelligently apart from building, and the pathfinding systems of the game will frequently have your tanks and trucks smashing through fences and road signs when they really don’t need to leave the convenient roads. Really, getting your units from place to place can sometimes be an exercise in frustration.

One interesting innovation Act of War presents is the ability to station infantry inside buildings around the city, creating hardened attack positions from which to fire on unsuspecting enemies. Instead of just building pillboxes and filling them with troops, you can literally create gauntlet box-canyons through which your enemies will have to pass in order to reach your base. The game uses its scenery to an impressive effect.

I found that the Skirmish and Multiplayer game suffers from the dreaded “tank rush” offensive. Resource lines are rather easy to destroy with a quick attack, crippling a player who does not immediately build defensively beyond recovery. Since the game’s release a pair of patches have been released that addresses some of the balancing issues, and they’ve improved the play greatly. It’s good to see that Atari is committed to following up on a few of the flaws this game does have.

The stumbling blocks that tended to trip me up were on the user-interface side of things. The build menus run together a bit, building pics looking a bit indistinct. This is really only a problem while you’re getting up and running, and experience will eventually have you building a base by reflex, but this might be a barrier to entry for easily-frustrated types. Also, the camera can take some getting used to, and the urban chaos found in a lot of the maps will have you searching all over for your troops.

Act of War looks simple on the surface. There aren’t a ton of units to play with, but they can all be put to use in interesting ways if you combine them correctly or use your environment in inventive ways. There’s a lot of subtlety lurking beneath the surface of this one. So long as Atari can keep up with the balance issues and exploits of the online game, this one’s well worth the addition to your collection.

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Posted by Brad on Jul 28th, 2005 and is filed under PC Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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