I tried the World In Conflict beta on the PC last night.

WOW.. friggin awesome.

The graphics are sexy (after the first beta patch that is). The game play is fun.

This is only a multi player beta.. but here’s the gist.

You choose a “role” with your other teammates. I chose armor.. other choices are infantry, air, and support. While in your role, all units of that role cost normal, and other units either cost extra, or are not available at all. So it forces you to work as a team for combined arms approaches.

The battles are fought in terrain-deforming maps that have control points. (usually 2-3 circles that are linked. you have to park some guys in all circles to control em) You then have a deployment side, where you spend deployment points on units, and then air-drop them in to your area of control. (your area of control is basically where your team starts, though this may change over time) As your guys die, or just if you do well on the battlefield, you will slowly get more points into your deployment pool. As soon as you have enough (and the cool down on the airdrop is over) you can order up more units and drop em in.

You ALSO get another kind of points slowly (lets call them radio points) These allow you to call in support things. In most games, this was limited to say.. 3-4 support things (artillery.. an airdropped tank INTO the battle..etc) In this game there are 3 whole sets of things, probably totalling 21-30 different things you can order in. The most expensive on the “destructive” side, is a nuke. MMM YEAH.. saw that go off once, though other things inculde: cluster bombs, guided missile, artillery barrage, paratroopers, para dropped-tank, para dropped-Humvee, and my favorite so far.. Gas attack (used a good drop to kill an entire 4 squads of inf. Oh yeah!) One nice thing about support is, once you call it in, there is a delay (10-20 seconds depending on the type of support) This means you have to plant this very powerful support in an area that you think your enemy will be in, in the next 20 seconds.. very challenging.

At any rate, in this multi player game, I was armor.. I was able to request air and inf support via the “q” key (like the hot-commands in BF2) AND the game has nice built in VOIP already. Game play was ALL about action, as you deployed your boys and got straight to the fightin’. All units all have “specials” as well, one offensive, and one defensive. Very neat stuff.

To sum up. This game was hella fun. Hella gorgeous.. and definitely worth your look while its in free beta.