Customer Reviews

Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds (PC)

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The game seems to be simple - you can be either Humans or Martians in the battle for England. But the details are not so simple - and it is down right FUN to play at that. Real time action during battles, research and development of new weapons and technology, figuring out resource management, deciding tactics and strategy at all levels of the game! So realistic you'll cheer when you gain victory or grumble when defeated. And tactics are important. When to retreat, where to place a gun, where to set a trap - the landscape can used to take advantage of mountains, rivers and buildings. You can create bottlenecks and overlapping fields of fire that the enemy will have to march through. You can lose many battles and still win the war!
If you are going to play the game for the first time play it as the humans - if they can beat off the first wave of Martian attackers England has a good chance of winning. You see, the Humans can build and research things faster than the Martians. And they have greater numbers even if their military units are weaker. So the Humans get stronger the more time they are given. And it is easier to defend than to attack.
The Martians start out stronger but can only attack from regions with a Command Post. So every time they take a region they have to slow down to build a Post. So time is against them - even victory will cause them delays as Handling Machines have to be brought up just to build the facilities needed for the next maneuver. Oh, your war machines are fast, powerful, can walk over landscape features, like rivers, that the Humans can't move thru but the alien machines are also slow to build and slow to repair. YET you need to be aggressive to win.
Of course if the Humans start to win they have to build Command Posts also and that slows them down!
The only big flaw is that the game will crash every once and awhile, which can get tiring. Also, the AI is not the brightest star in the sky. It has no idea what a massed attack is and also has a bad tactic of slamming warships onto the beach when going after Martians. The AI does have one big advantage - its units seem to be better at aimming. They are more likely to hit your units than your units are to hit theirs.
If this game was re-released, even as is, for the Playstation Two or Three, I would very likely buy those systems just to play the game! Just being able to finish a game without it crashing would be nice.
But its still fun to stomp tripods over the landscape, Heat-Rays blazing away, with Jeff Wayne's music in the background.

Although the graphics are showing of a game that's clearly not from recent years, Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds is fantastic. The gameplay is addictive if you like a your strategy games. Even running on a 64 Bit copy of Windows 7 it's easy enough to get this working. Simply download yourself Smack32w.dll from somewhere if you're having that trouble, bung it on compatability mode with Windows 98 with Visual themes, desktop composition and display scaling on high DPI settings all disabled and it runs like a dream.

I'd highly recommend this to anyone who is a fan of the War of the Worlds and is equally into gaming. Buy this and you won't be disappointed at all.

Although I asked 3 or 4 gamers before I bought the game whether it would play on an XP system (It was a windows 98 game) or not before I purchased; it would not load on any of the 3 computers in our home. It was the only thing my 9 year old autistic son had asked for so we went from ecstacy to tears for Christmas. I am now looking at Goodwill for an old computer that will play this game. He's a cool kid that just wants to be a Martian; and I hope at some point he will be.