MicroProse's This Means War! is the latest in the current trend of real-time strategy games. Following in the wake of projects like Command & Conquer and Warcraft II is a tough bill, but the developers of This Means War!, Starjammer Studios, took enough of a different tack to set This Means War! apart from these earlier games.
From browsing the outside of the box ("The strategy building game for people who like to blow things up!") you may get the impression that this is quite a lighthearted game, heavy on action. But actually, this is a much more complex game than others of the genre. You have more resources to worry about, for one thing. You must build farms, housing lots, oil wells, mines, and steel mills, just to produce the resources to drive your war machine. If any of these areas is deficient, your production abilities will suffer for it.
One very fresh facet of This Means War! is combat experience. As a unit gets kills, it earns experience and eventually advances in rank. The higher the rank, the more effective the unit becomes. By forming teams of units under the command of a ranking officer, you can improve the abilities of all members of that team. This causes great cries of dismay when your favorite officer takes a bullet, believe me. There are also formation commands. So you can, for instance, order a team into a wedge formation. Then by issuing movement commands to the leader, the whole team will move, maintaining its formation. This aspect lends the game a curious Napoleonic flavor, as your machine-gun toting infantry wheel and march in tight formation.
Unfortunately, the This Means War! interface has some strange quirks. Most notable is the contrasting purposes of the right mouse button. By right-clicking on a building or unit, you'll pop up a properties menu that allows you to give the unit orders or adjust various game settings. But, by holding down the right mouse button and dragging, you can scroll the map. This is a welcome feature, since scroll bars can be rather cumbersome when you're trying to swiftly mouse your way back and forth across a battlefield. The problem is that, very often in a This Means War! scenario, virtually every square foot of terrain will be holding either a structure or a unit. Thus, you find yourself continually popping up the properties menu when what you wanted to do was scroll the map. This quickly becomes infuriating, and is by far the worst example from a list of minor interface concerns.
It takes a while to get used to playing this game. Units move over a grid of squares, but the squares are not shown on the map. A unit moves from the center of one square to the center of another. Once it is on its way, it won't respond to new orders until after it reaches the center of the square it is currently headed towards. If it is a slow moving unit, reaching this next "turning point" can take some time.
Without a doubt, the biggest flaw in this game is its speed. As unit and structure density increases, the game slows down. Now, perhaps it is my personal style of playing this sort of game û I tend to throw up a hasty defense and build up an infrastructure before I head out to meet and pummel the enemy. This means I usually have many units, as does the enemy. By the time I had my war machine cranking, I had the game running at its fastest speed, and it was still way too slow for my tastes, on a P-100 with sixteen megs of RAM.
Time for the bottom line. This is a tough one. There is a lot to like about This Means War! It requires more thought and planning than C&C or Warcraft II did. In this respect it is much more of a strategy game. The use of experience and team formation was a nice touch, and added a lot to the gameplay. On the down side the interface was clunky, at least for a real-time game, and overall game speed was way too slow. If you have some serious silicon, or if you like your real-time strategy at a fairly sedate pace, then check this one out because it has some really nice aspects to it. If you're looking for an interim adrenaline rush while you wait for C&C: Red Alert to come out, then you'll probably find This Means War! to be slow going. Oh, and there are no multi-player options. This one is for patient strategy lovers only.
