Edited by: Tiffany Lillie

ROUGH LAUNCH

Developers of The Farm 51 undertook an extremely ambitious project with World War 3. Announced earlier this year, fans of modern FPSs flocked to the idea of a new shooter that could bridge the gap between Battlefield 3 and the new age of gamers. While the hype was built for the launch on October 19th, 2018, the community was met with a plethora of game-breaking bugs. I was cursed by perpetual loading screens and consistent crashing. Yet, the developers have put in work and time since then to rectify their errors, showing that World War 3 won’t just be another dead-on-arrival game for the Steam archives.

LOCKED, LOADED, AND LOADING…

I wanted to wait for the problems to pass before I began writing this review. I believed the developers in their comments that they were hard at work to fix their issues and I didn’t want to do them the injustice of giving them a bad wrap just based on a significant server flaw. The main reason I wanted to wait is because I was able to experience the game prior to the launch day and it truly is an exciting title. While the quality of the launch and the unplayable state that it remained in for a few days was extremely frustrating, I have high hopes for the coming weeks and patches.

GRAPHICS, GUNS, GOOD TIMES

World War 3 offers players the opportunity to truly customize their weapon systems, vehicles, and their warrior. Weapon customization feels meaningful and offers a wide variety of changes to be made, from altering your stocks, pistol grips, rail systems, and barrels, to optics, secondary backup iron sights, muzzle breaks, and even bipods and forward grips. You are truly able to create a weapon platform that conforms to your play style and likes. Soldier customization offers a plethora of different camouflage patterns, helmets or other headgear, gloves, and armor carriers.

Vehicle customization is very interesting. Each vehicle can be called to the battlefield when you earn enough battle points. While customizing your tanks or armored personnel carriers, you are able to add armor, different optics, mounted secondary weapon systems, and from the looks of it, soon we will be able to change out engines. All of these add-ons cause the vehicle to cost more to deploy. Among driveable vehicles, there are also call-ins for artillery support, bombing runs, precision strike aircraft, radar drones and some pilotable offensive drones, such as the Leviathan: a six-wheeled attack drone with a mounted weapon of your choosing.

Graphics wise, World War 3 is a mixed bag of high-quality textures and sub-par terrain pieces. Soldiers and vehicles look phenomenal, while some of the terrain looks like last-gen texture. I am sure we will see these pieces evolve in the future, but as of now, you’ll have to deal with some shoddy-looking dirt and the occasional low-definition pile of rubble to hide behind. While this isn’t inherently an issue, it's worth mentioning.

THE WORLD AT WAR

The overall premise of this title is to drive players to conquer areas of the world map that update throughout the day, showing which side is winning the war. While I haven’t seen a benefit to conquest yet, it does provide players with a bigger-picture goal. Each match consists of the same game mode, which is like BattleFields’ Conquest mode. Players will fight over objectives to gain control of the map. So far, I have not seen another game mode present.

SURPRISE

Only in-game will you find out how much your created warrior and weapons are going to benefit or hinder you, because there is no way of testing your weapons prior to joining a match; you won’t know if you made the right choice on optics or any other option. This seems like a real problem to me, as it limits your ability to know your gear, and becomes a trial and error of what worked and what didn’t after each match. In the future, hopefully we can get a firing range of sorts to be able to try out different platforms.

SUITING UP

While this game might bring back memories of BattleField, it definitely operates on a different frequency. Armor plays a huge role. During design of your soldier, you are able to select different types of plates for your chest carrier, as well as the armor rating of your helmet. Each of these armor types provides different levels of protection against incoming fire. This also means that all players have vulnerabilities, such as being vulnerable in the legs or lower abdomen, as no soldier has any armor on these areas. This adds another level of thought to the game, especially when you enter rooms with enemies or if you’re playing the sniper role. You will need to think before you aim center mass on a target, as you may just inflict damage to their armor, but not neutralize the threat.

PERFORMANCE

World War 3 runs extremely well. It offers you the ability to be in full control of your character. You will be able to lean corners, go prone and roll from your stomach to your back, slide into a crouched position and vault small objects. This all comes at the cost of feeling slightly clunky. I felt as if every animation had to finish prior to the next one beginning. For instance, when you want to slide into cover from a sprint, the sprint animation ceases, slide begins, slide ends, crouch. Each of these points of start and end are extremely apparent. While fluidity isn’t necessary to make a good title, it does feel awkward and jerky to maneuver obstacles.