War Leaders: Clash of Nations E3 2005 Impressions

Publisher CDV seems intent on converting every square inch of history of World War II into a PC gaming experience, and War Leaders: Clash of Nations is its attempt to meld a strategic metagame with an real-time strategy game. It's hoping that the result will blend the familiarity and strategic depth of a real-time strategy game with the diplomacy, research, and troop positioning aspect of a board-game-esque overworld map.

We had a chance to see War Leaders at CDV today and managed to take a look at both the overworld metagame and the RTS engine. At the start of the game, you'll be able to choose one of seven prime players in World War II, including Germany, Great Britain, France, Japan, and, of course, America, and attempt to position your troops so that you eventually vanquish your foes. Troop movement is a simple drag-and-drop process; you select a unit in one territory, then drag it to an adjacent territory to invade it. Fans of Axis & Allies should be right at home here. We didn't get a chance to see many options that CDV is planning to implement for the strategic map, but it's promising the ability to control espionage in addition to the diplomacy and research efforts mentioned above.

As in the Axis & Allies computer game, you can choose to enter battles when they occur or have the computer simulate the results instantly. We're guessing that you'll probably want to take direct control in most situations, unless you have a preponderance of firepower to bring to bear.

The graphics in the RTS portion of War Leaders are somewhat rough at this stage of development and hopefully will be seeing a bit more love before the game ships. Although the levels that we've seen were a bit spartan in terms of detail, the game does promise to have some pretty cool explosion effects, as evidenced by a special "destruction demo" that CDV showed off for us. After setting off explosions by clicking around on a test map, we saw fences flying apart in all directions, explosive barrels setting off large chain reactions, and even a bit of terrain deformation.

Only time will tell whether War Leaders: Clash of Nations can stand out from the glut of World War II RTS games, but it seems to have some interesting ideas. Keep an eye on GameSpot for more info on the game.