Will of steel is an RTS where you command a USMC battalion through campaign episodes in Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. You will have a nice complement of infantry, armor and air support. Twenty-six units in all from a rifleman, A3 Abrams tanks, to Apache choppers - pretty much everything the Marine Corps has to get the job done. As you and your soldiers move up through the ranks you do get promotions throughout the game’s 16 missions. This would have been really interesting if there was a multiplayer option. MP communities that get a sense of accomplishment as they get promoted seem to have lasting online play despite how old the game is.

WOS has taken out the familiar gather-and-build concept out of the game, which is almost a given in most RTS titles. This lets you focus on the action and spend less time micro-manging. At least that’s the intention. (More on that in a minute) I found this to be love-hate tradeoff. Yes, it was nice not to worry about gathering resources to move up a tech tree to get all the cool gadgets to beat the enemy with and just worry about the battlefield. The downside is that you start off with units that you can not pre-select and you have to rely on reinforcements and hope to God it's enough to live through the mission.

The idea of less micro-managing is a great concept, but when your units can’t seem to find their way out of a paper bag it gets frustrating beyond belief. The unit’s pathfinding skills are totally blah. You will find that they get stuck behind destroyed vehicles and trees and bump into each other even with the simplest of orders, which can have you scratching your head.

In one game I had a tank stuck behind a blown-up humvee. Now since when can’t a tank just roll over this mess? Ok, fair enough, you can shoot it again to totally destroy it into oblivion, but I should not have to do it twice. I guess you could use a medic to capture it and use it among your force, but I can’t say I have ever seen that on CNN. If something is in the way of a tank it should be blown away or just rolled over. Just my opinion, I could be wrong!

Furthermore, the line-of-sight is less than the firing range. So you have to always have someone on point and hope to hell that your back-up units destroy the target or your point unit is dead. I mostly solved this by sending many more troops than what would be needed to have a better survival rate. It just made me a bit cranky when I could not see what the heck my men were firing at. Needless to say you still do a fair share of mico-manging your units. This coupled with a very awkward keyboard layout made learning the game a bear. I did enjoy having the use of special abilities like calling in satellite recon, artillary bombardments, and bombing runs. These definitely help when you need to knock out a force that is larger than your own.

Oh, did I mention the quick reference card, manual, or in-game help. I didn’t think so. There is no in-game help whatsoever with the exception of hovering over an icon to see what the command is. Both the manual and the quick reference card are both in a PDF file that you have to print off if you want to have it at the ready. The manual is as weak as they come; in fact, I would go as far to say it might as well not even be there. There is nothing to describe how units fight, hit points damage they do, how many guys you can transport, etc. NOTHING. Everything is trial and error, and you can view some of the stats but only after selecting the unit in question during gameplay.

Now my final rant. The infantry's eight units all appear to look alike. There are a some subtle differences when you move the camera to get as close as you can to the battlefield, but from a top-down view it is quite difficult. Just at the onset of the game you have to play with the camera angle just to get it right. Moving my mouse north should not move my map area east. C'mon guys, this is basic stuff.

The graphics and sound are pretty decent for this type of genre. Good map size and pretty nice attention to detail - though nothing like you see in FPS-type games, but RTS games never focus on eye-popping graphics because they just are not a necessity of the genre. It's more about gameplay, and any RTS player will tell you that. Explosions and ambient sounds were good and even the voiceovers were realistic. There are some times, though, where a unit could be taking fire, but rather than yelling "we're taking fire!!!," it sounds more like "ah just to let you know we are taking fire over here can you come help out I gotta pick up my kids from soccer practice." Fortunately this doesn’t happen all the time.

The game’s saving grace comes from the voice command option. I have used this technology in other games and I find it to be an awesome improvement in the gaming industry. This is the first title that I know of, (there maybe more so save the hate mail), that has offered this in an RTS game. This does make commanding MUCH easier, but if you don’t have microphone you're stuck in the awkward keyboard commands that you can not customize. Still a few bugs to work out with the voice commands but did make the game more enjoyable to play.

In my opinion this game is going to really appease fans of the specific genre and by that I mean an RTS setting in the not-so-distant past on battles we are still fighting today. The game does have its moments, but it is just too limited to my liking. A multiplayer feature could have added a new dimension to this game, but unfortunately the developers left it by the wayside.

Gameplay: 5.0
Poor GUI, only in-game options are sound controls and voice option. Any manuals or video options have to be preset or viewed from the Microsoft 'my program' list. There is no help whatsoever on what each unit does or how to use each unit effectively. Add poor pathfinding and infantry units that nearly all look alike from a top-down menu make this game a bear to learn.

Graphics: 7.5
A bit above average. Again, hard to tell most infantry units apart. Medics, anti-tank guys, riflemen, etc., look pretty much the same. The game can hardly be played at 800x600 because the text blurs together. I would highly recommend playing at higher levels. In fact, it almost a necessity. The explosions and attention to detail in the urban environments were nicely rendered. The maps were a bit bland, but hey, this is the desert we are talking about here. Thankfully they are not that big so you don’t spend a lot of time watching the sand blow.

Sound: 7.0
The sound effects and musical score were pretty decent but nothing we have not heard before. The voiceovers, for the most part, were decently done. There are times when the men's voices were not too convincing while taking fire though, as they inflected like it was no big deal.

Difficulty: Medium
The most challenging part of the game is learning it. Lack of a decent manual and very little in-game help made this title way too much work. Once I finally got it down I really had no interest in playing anymore. Games should not be this much work. At least have a PRINTED, well-documented manual if you are not going to have an in-game help screen or keyboard layout. A customizable keyboard would have been nice as well. The voice-command option with use of a microphone where you can actually speak commands for your units to follow did help.

Concept: 6.0
The only element saving this section is the use of a voice-command option. Other than that we have seen all this before, though the graphics I would say to be above most RTS games.

Multiplayer: N/A
Too bad, this could have helped the game score a bit better

Overall: 6.2
Even at 6.2 I’m feeling generous here. If the user interface and manuals were more thought-out, had a multiplayer option, and better unit pathfinding skills, it could have been a solid game. It does have its strong points; too bad there were not more of them.