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Real time strategy games are one of the most popular genres on the pc platform. Lately, a lot of developers have taken a liking to making games based on World War 2. Legend and Strategy First have come together to bring those 2 key elements together to bring you War Times, a RTS that puts you in control of an army, and ultimately, the fate of the war.

Anyone that has played a RTS game before will be on familiar grounds with War Times, since it’s exactly like every other RTS game out there, with nothing unique to offer. When you start up the campaign, you are given the choice between Axis and Allies. Once you choose your side, you are treated to a short video, and your mission starts. The first thing you’ll notice as soon as the game starts up is that it sure isn’t an eye pleasure. Units are fairly low-res, and jagged, while the structures and terrain are little better. Your first mission as an Allie has you defending evacuating troops on their escape route. You do this by simply taking soldiers from your camp to the extraction point highlighted on the map. Your base is only a little way away from the point, so after you start building your men, it’s relatively easy to just send them on their way. The enemy AI will try to storm the evacuation point with small numbers of men, usually 4 or 5. By the time they make their first strike, you should likely have a nice force of 10-20 soldiers by then, making them easy pickings once they come after you. Things like this become common place in the game, since the enemy AI is pretty bad. It just really seems like the AI tries the same things over and over, hoping that your army of men will suddenly keel over and die. This, of course, is not the way things work, so instead you end up with a lot of 20 on 6 battles that are far less than satisfying. You can usually find victory with minimal effort and/or casualties to your army.

One unconventional turn War Times takes is the way buildings are created. Double click an empty piece of ground, and your construction menu comes up. Select the building/structure of choice, choose where you want it, and click. Construction begins immediately, without the aid of a worker, unlike a lot of RTS. This may confuse some people at first as it did me, since I was clicking on numerous workers to try to find the ‘build’ option in their command list. Once you get the hang of that though, you’ll be happy to be able to build things without having to tie up one of your valuable men in the process. You won’t find anything special in the buildings section, tank factories, barracks etc., all pretty standard fair for a WWII RTS.

Through the 2 campaigns, there are about 30 missions: roughly 15 each, give or take. During the first handful of missions, the game really puts a cap on what you can do. For example, in the first mission, it’s impossible to build anything outside of supply buildings, and in the second level, nothing upwards of barracks. I assume these restrictions were put in place to ease you into the gameplay, or to stop you from completely pounding the AI team, but in any case, it’s very limiting and puts a damper on the fun you could have during the first bits of the game. Fortunately, once you get into the later levels, the game opens up to allow you to assume mass forces of several types of infantry and armory. This is where the most fun of the game can be had, even if only marginally. Due to the ‘been there, done that’ aspect of the game, it’s hard to have a lot of fun with it, knowing how many better RTS games there are out there (Command & Conquer, anyone?).

As with any RTS game, good or otherwise, War Times includes a multiplayer mode in the classic fashion of ‘I’m gonna build an army and kill you’ mode. Since the game doesn’t really offer much in the way of fun, the idea of playing online against other people isn’t that much different, though you don’t have to worry about predictable and stupid AI anymore. Unfortunately though, it’s just not enough to play with someone else online.

War Times just doesn’t do anything overly well. The graphics in the game are sub-par, and offer little to keep you visually interested. Certain aspects of the game look decent, like the water and the trees, but units and buildings don’t look overly great, and the terrain is bland-looking. The sound effects, like the gunfire and explosions offer little satisfaction as you raid enemy camps, and voices from your units bellowing out ‘Here’ and “Yessir’ leave little to no impression. The games soundtrack is forgettable, and offers little in the way of improving the experience (like good soundtracks do).

War Times is far off from being a horrible game, but it doesn’t stand out from the overcrowded RTS genre pickings either. The multiplayer component of the game is fun for a bit if you can find someone to play with, but it’s not worth the price of admission.