It must be stated from the outset that World War II Online is buggy. If you expect a polished product out of the box--and you probably should--then it's definitely not for you. On the other hand, if you're completely dissatisfied with the collaborative experience of playing other massively multiplayer games, and you think nothing of downloading large patches, poring over help files and online resources, and you don't have a habit of throwing your hands up in disgust the first five times your machine crashes, then WWII Online has a lot to offer--seriously.

Infantrymen must stick together to survive.

The premise of the game is straightforward but very ambitious: It lets you fight in a persistent, fully 3D online WWII universe as a tank commander, fighter-bomber pilot, antitank gunner, or simply as an infantry trooper, and you participate in an ongoing campaign where your battlefield achievements directly influence a wider war. It's a stunningly simple concept and quite a compelling one. Unfortunately, the simplest concepts can still be very difficult to implement--WWII Online exists as evidence of that.

WWII Online was launched long before it was ready, and purchasers were faced with downloading a 70MB patch before they could even play the game--if they could get the game to run at all, or if they were lucky enough to be able to connect to a working server. While performance has improved greatly since the days following the game's release (when it was essentially unplayable), there are still more technical problems, performance issues, and missing features than can be enumerated in the limited space of this review. You still need to download all the patches, so if you're on a slow connection, be prepared to wait some time before you can actually get into the game. Once you start playing, many of the problems will become apparent in short order. The 3D graphics are merely passable, the interface is atrocious, the sound is merely a probably realistic-but-dull whine of engines, communication is extremely difficult, and low frame rates are a serious problem. Loading or respawn times can take up to 10 minutes. It's a testament to the impressive concept of the game that even with all of its innumerable problems, WWII Online can still be worthwhile.

WWII Online is not a first-person shooter set in World War II. Cornered Rat made some rather interesting design decisions, all of which focused on highlighting the realistic limitations on men and equipment--a concept that is often fudged in other games for gameplay reasons. Infantry weapons are extremely cumbersome to use (there is a three-stroke sequence to raise, aim, and fire your rifle) and when in a vehicle, you can only perform the task of the vehicle crewman you are portraying. For example, if you want to drive a tank, you have to be sitting in the driver's seat and thus are restricted to looking out the driver's view slit. If you want to look out the top hatch, you'll need to switch to the tank commander's position, but then you won't be able to steer. In some tanks the driver is also the gunner, but if he isn't you'll have to switch between those positions as well. If this sounds cumbersome, it most certainly is. The design intention is to have you man tanks cooperatively. Each tank has different gear-sets (the Panzer IIIF has 10 gears plus neutral and reverse). You have no real heads-up display (except for a persistent compass), and you have to choose between looking at your instruments and looking at the action. All for the sake of realism.

Even aiming and firing is not a simple process in WWII Online.

So is WWII Online realistic? Who knows--it's simply crazy. Sometimes you'll spawn, and it will be like the Sitzkrieg, where there's no one around and you'll find yourself just driving down a road hoping to find an enemy to shoot at. Other times, you'll be part of a massive offensive so crowded that you'll be unable to exit the spawn point until the guy in front of you figures out how to move. Once you're moving, there's the issue of finding the battlefield, then getting there, all the while hoping you don't get killed or the game doesn't crash. Several times I spent 15 minutes just getting to the front, only to have the game disconnect me before I could even fire a shot in anger. But the times when I actually got to fight, the experience was exhilarating--perhaps to some extent because the game usually didn't let me get that far.

One technical issue that has ended up radically affecting the game design is scalability. The original intention was to have a single persistent gameworld. Unfortunately, this proved impossible upon release--the game currently has up to seven gameworlds available at one time to reduce the load on the individual worlds. What will happen when the single persistent world is launched? How will the change in player density affect gameplay? Add it to the list of questions the $40 you could spend on the game would try to answer.