Introduction

Developer: OC Incorporated
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Interactive

Real War! What is it? As a favor to the PR staff of Simon and Schuster, I'll tell you what Real War is not. The game is far from being a hardcore military simulation. So for all those grognards, lovers of Battleground, and whatever other games happen to fall into the category of knowing what battle it was that Vasily Zaitsev made his bullet ring true - look elsewhere.

Real War is actually based off of a simulator that was meant for the US military, of course the details were changed a bit. This was done to make it palatable to the people who don't spend their spare time watching the History channel and other war documentaries. Gone is the detail that only a military man would know. So instead of seeing the M1A1 Abrams, you will more or less see "light tank" or "heavy tank". If you can identify the little tanks, planes, or guns you can bet they were based off of the real things. They meant this game to be for the casual gamer, the kind of person that plays Starcraft or Command and Conquer. Make no mistake; this game is pure RTS.

Mucky water

Pesky villagers

Story

Since the commies are gone and the Nazis got their butts kicked a long time ago, who's left? Real War decided to somehow mix up the whole Mid-East tension scene with a bit of the former Yugoslavia thrown in for good measure. We don't know the entire plot yet, but I'm willing to lay good bets that Saddam isn't going to be dating Slobodan in this game.

Video

When we saw the video sequences on the projector, I thought to myself, "Wow, more military stock footage. That'll be fun." (And that is fun for me. :P) Then they told us it was all rendered. If there is any part of Real War that lives up to the word "Real" this has to be it. It was seriously impossible to tell some guy on a 400 MHz machine generated these images. To make us believe, we were shown a wire frame version of the video alongside a fully textured version. Simply stunning. Remember when Command and Conquer came out with its pre-rendered sequences? These are orders of magnitude better.

B-52! Rock lobster.

They're making snow angels. How cute.

Units

From what we saw of the units, there sure are a lot of them - around thirty per side! Whether there is an even mix of sea, air, and land vehicles remains to be seen; but we do know that Real War has made much more than a cursory attempt at aerial warfare. There are a number of planes and helicopters that can be used in a variety of ways. Most interesting was the propaganda plane. You can use this unit to fly over enemy territory and drop off leaflets and other assorted bits of propaganda, in order to decrease the moral of the enemy. Some of enemy might get scared enough to start fighting for you. I can just imagine playing a multiplayer game, only to have my entire base start shooting itself. Oh the woe.

To keep with the quirky aerial theme, combat jets can even drop flares and other items to evade missiles. Seeing the planes fight is also rather interesting. They will dodge, dive and fight to get some sort of advantage over their opponents like real pilots. We were even told that the sayings that the units have are very similar to what modern day pilots actually use in combat.