Pre-E3 06: World in Conflict first look

You wouldn’t think there would be too many new wrinkles left in Real-time Strategy games, but developer Massive (you may recall their Ground Control RTS series), may just have found one. The innovation certainly isn’t in the setting, which seems to be loosely based on that neocon wankfest of a Patrick Swayze movie Red Dawn - it's 1989, and in the game’s alternate universe, instead of the previous decade having seen the collapse and Balkanization of the Soviet Union, the Reds have managed to pull themselves together well enough to launch a desperate invasion of the US.

No, the game's most interesting feature is in its lack of any sort of complex resource management. Instead of having to dig up gold or harvest tiberium, each player begins the game with a set number of deployment points, which you can use immediately to purchase units. Things like infantry are, naturally, pretty cheap, while nuclear warheads cost a bundle (but also, naturally, carry a ferocious amount of destructive power).