FREE GAMES REVIEW: World Conqueror 3
It’ll invade your time, set up a naval base and sink your social life.
Drug use, alcoholism and crime are on the decline; for who needs a hypodermic full of Leith’s most dangerous Lucozade when you have a small portable games console in your pocket?
It’s clear why some free games are free: they’re little more than 1-dimensional advert delivery systems. On some of the more woeful titles, you can’t even make your blurry pink blob step very slightly right without triggering another 30-second commercial. But, every so often, you happen upon a total gem which makes you rub your eyes in wonder, raise your hands to the developer gods and shout “Why hast thou blessed me with such bounty? What’s in it for thee, oh makers?”
Step forward World Conqueror 3.
At first glance, the game doesn’t seem to offer anything that special: typical campaign map, similar networks of hexagons to move your tanks, infantry, artillery and ships about the place on in a standard turn-based style. Generally speaking, you’re trying to blow up other units or capture settlements. There’s nothing terrifically original about that. There’s no mission to kidnap Hitler’s brain. So what makes it interesting?
First, you have to acquire and develop generals and attach them to different units. Train one up in tank warfare and he’ll become the next Montgomery. Give him some swimming lessons and you’ll have Admiral Dönitz on your hands. Generals are essential to the game. Woe betide the fool who goes steaming into Conquer World mode without generals and starts blubbing because it’s too hard. And that blubberer, dear reader, was I.
Medals and points of various kinds are earned by both completing campaigns and various types of challenges. The quicker you complete the campaign battles, the more medals you get — which can then be spent upgrading your generals at military colleges. As you level up, new missions are unlocked and new difficulty settings mean larger rewards.
What do new difficulty settings mean? That’s the one.
What makes it interesting is that the little side challenges include different types of game: Rescue the Ally, Hold The Ground and Wipe Out The Enemy. Rather that competing on sprawling maps, these mini-missions are on a much smaller scale with fewer units. Every move is critical and mistakes are quickly capitalised on by the AI. These challenges are less Command & Conquer and more chess with tanks — which is an obvious improvement on chess. These games are also a lot shorter (usually 8 turns long) so it’s far less painful to restart the game and mutter “Ok, ok. This time I’ll do it differently” under your breath as your mother looks on quizzically from the other side of the table. I love Christmas!
There’s also lots of other things you can fritter away your time doing: build Wonders to improve your cities HP or how much steel you get each turn. Alternatively, send your generals off to complete little operations in your absence. I’m sure there’s good reasons for all of this but it elicits a Partridge shrug from me. But sure. Keep it in.
Because it’s a game created by foolish mortals, however, there are things that are bound to stick in your craw. Send your 10 general-free tanks over to finish the job in Moscow and watch them get scattered to the wind by one artillery piece manned by some three star uber-bastard with a stubbornly large moustache. When you do have a city surrounded and the turn clock is running down, you’ll find yourself literally one bullet away from finishing off the city’s defences. End the turn and somehow the beleaguered population has managed to knock together a tank made of Adamantium, necessitating another 3 turn slog-fest to shift the bastard. Who knew the A-Team hailed from Cairo, eh?
Play the same level with the same troops and outcomes can be wildly different, though arguably that adds a little variety. Fortunes of war and all that.
There are nice little touches too. Because all machinery runs on petrol, it’s incumbent upon you to capture and hold enough fuel dumps and oil platforms to keep the show running — otherwise your ships and tanks will just grind to a halt.
Most units have their weaknesses against others (cheap submarines cause havoc in shipping) so a winning strategy isn’t just about spawning the toughest tanks available. There are also a few different ways to complete a mission. There’s no linear Broken Sword “put grease onto chicken, put chicken into engine, pick up feathers, make security guard sneeze” going on here — so it does feel like you can play the game your way.
World Conqueror 3 uses the same collect points to level up to collect points hour-stealing pyramid scheme as most games, but the execution here means that it doesn’t all feel like some relentless chore. There are even different starting eras: 1939, 1943, 1950 and even an alien invasion mode.
If you’ve got a leisurely, slightly hungover Sunday in front of you, download this little beauty and and let your partner’s conversation blur into the background. If, however, you’ve got any kind of deadline to complete/operation to perform/bomb to deuse, delete your visit to this website and let’s never speak of this again.
