Much has been written about World in Conflict's multiplayer gameplay. After all, with the conclusion of the recent multiplayer beta test, players had a chance to check out the game's cool twist on real-time strategy gameplay. Rather than build bases and gather resources or micromanage huge armies, you take part in a team game, playing an important role on a World War III battlefield. However, we haven't really had a chance to check out the game's single-player campaign. So when we got a work-in-progress version of the game recently, we dove right in to find out how the single-player and story are shaping up. Please note that the following includes slight plot spoilers.

World in Conflict is about what might have happened if the Soviet Union had decided to go down fighting in 1989 rather than collapse internally. The Red Army invades Germany and Western Europe; thus, US forces are rushed in to reinforce its allies. However, with its forces away, America is vulnerable, so the Soviets invade the West Coast, landing in Seattle. It's a heck of a premise for a game, but we were surprised to see where everything goes from there.

You play as Lieutenant Parker, a promising young officer in a battalion headed by the fiery Colonel Sawyer, and serve alongside the brash Captain Bannon. World in Conflict spends a lot of time developing these characters and the overarching plot, which itself seems fairly ambitious, as it seeks to tie together this global conflict. The story is told through stylishly drawn cutscenes and Alec Baldwin's narration. Baldwin's narrator talks from the perspective of one of the participants in the battles, so he sounds like a soldier writing his memoirs. As you'd expect from an actor of Baldwin's stature, he's excellent in the role.

We played missions from the middle of the single-player campaign, but they weren't set in the US. Rather, the first mission was set in France, and it's a flashback to the early days of the war, prior to the invasion of Seattle. The Soviet Union wiped out the US Sixth Fleet early in the war, paving the way for an amphibious invasion of Southern France. Your American unit is sent to assist the NATO forces attempting to repulse it, paving the way to liberate Marseilles.

Each mission features primary and secondary objectives. While the latter objectives are optional, they can be very helpful, as the Marseilles mission shows. Your first objective in the mission is to seize a key lighthouse facility atop a seaside bluff, but you only have 25 minutes to do it. These kind of timed objectives are common and add an appropriate amount of tension because you don't have a lot of leeway to experiment. If the clock is ticking down and you're running out of time, you have to start gambling. On the way to seize the lighthouse, you can also seize a vineyard to accomplish a secondary objective. Those aren't required, but doing so can often help you out by opening up new drop zones (by which you can receive reinforcements), as well as additional units. Capturing the hill allows you to also recapture some antiair units, which will be a bit helpful later in the mission.

Once the lighthouse is secure, it's on to the next objective, which is to clear a village at the base of the hill where the lighthouse is located. If you seized the aforementioned vineyard, you'll get a couple of heavy artillery units. These are basically rocket launchers that can absolutely shred buildings and units. If you played the multiplayer beta, then you know that artillery has an impressively long reach to it, so you deliver devastation from a distance. If you station the artillery atop the hill, you can use your ground units to slowly advance and act as spotters for artillery fire. Thankfully, there's not much issue with collateral damage in the game, so you can literally destroy a town to save it. Once the village is cleared, your next job is to fortify it in preparation for a Soviet counterattack. This is done by stationing units in various objective points, which slowly fortifies them with machine gun, antitank, and antiaircraft positions. You then have to withstand waves of attacking helicopters and armor, but if you're smart, you'll have dropped a repair vehicle onto the battlefield to bring damaged units back up to full health. If you can survive that, congratulations are in order because you've accomplished the mission