Pushing out with large amounts of US infantry, I was able to cap a run of banks and fortify them with cheap MG emplacements. The match was interesting from the start: my initial location had lots of oil but little aluminium, so I opted for a low-tech build.
I wanted to see how the large maps and random placement of resources affected a more dynamic style of game. There are plenty of maps, varied options for AI difficulty and team composition, and lots of potential value in discovering all of these over time.Īfter several hours of one-on-one skirmishes, I thought I'd try something more challenging-a four player free-for-all. For this reason I found skirmish matches to be a more entertaining way to learn Act of Aggression than the campaign. The game is at its best when every player adheres to the same set of rules and all of its systems are in play at once. I did hit a couple of problems when alt-tabbing, however, including the position of the mouse cursor falling out of sync with the game itself. Graphics options Window type, vsync, render reduction, shader/texture quality, texture anisotropy, shadow quality, model quality, tessellation, LOD transition, terrain and water quality, dynamic lighting and fx, HDR, motion blur, ambient occlusion, reflections, hardware instancingĪct of Aggression ran well on a mixture of high and very high settings-steady 60fps with no noticable dips. Reviewed on Intel Core i5 2500K, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 Plot isn't very important to a game like this, but there's no C&C-style FMV scenery-chewing to motivate you, either. The writing and acting is poor and the game uses photography, news-report style visual effects and stock footage in place of cutscenes. There are two sets of missions-one for Chimera, another for the Cartel-set in a homebrew Clancyverse that offers nothing you haven't seen in dozens of other modern warfare games. The campaign is a limp introduction to all of this, however. If you've played these types of games before you'll have an immediate sense of what units to expect and how they feel in combat: Act of Aggression doesn't offer anything particularly new in that regard, but there's pleasure in familiarity. Tank columns roll through the countryside, helicopters clash in the air, jets soar in from off-map as each player approaches the point where they can deploy match-ending superweapons like nukes and long-range artillery. You might send a platoon of soldiers to capture downed enemy combatants for a bounty, or engage in a daring medivac mission to prevent the same from happening to your own troops. An infantry battle might break out between garrisoned buildings for control of a bank which generates resources over time for the side that holds it. What follows is the drama of the match proper.