I picked up World in Conflict (with Soviet Assault expansion) for half price from Steam a couple weeks ago (yeah, I’m pretty fond of waiting for half-price weekend specials, if you hadn’t noticed).

I picked this particular RTS game because I see it referenced a lot (along with Crysis) in PC video card benchmarks.

Now I understand why.

When I first ran it, I got a whopping 11 FPS average on the built-in benchmark.  With judicious tweaking of the settings, I’ve gotten it up to around 25 FPS, but I had to turn off all the cool settings.  So it’s official:  My gaming PC is hopelessly out of date and will probably need to be put down soon.  Or worse:  Relegated to “casual” games (shudder).

(I’ve spec’ed out a new gaming PC -- a Core i7 with Nvidia GTX 275 -- but the parts are coming in at over $800 from NewEgg right now so I’ll be holding off on that for a while.  Which was a large contributing factor in my decision to buy one of the new $299 PS3 Slims -- more on that some other time.)

Back to World in Conflict.  The game itself is okay, but it’s not knocking my socks off (in single player).  I find it a little difficult to control all the units, but then I’m not a hardcore RTS player and I’m too lazy to learn all of the hundreds of shortcut keys.

The cut scenes in particular are kind of random and pointless… they are trying for an emotional “war is hell” sort of vibe but it comes across pretty cheesy.

I can’t see myself playing this for too long, especially without all the eye candy settings.  It’s just a series of mildly entertaining capture-and-hold scenarios that really aren’t that entertaining.  I have no idea why it won Best Strategy Game in 2007, unless the multiplayer is radically better.  I’ll give the single player campaign a 2… out of 5.