Act of War: Direct Action

I came to Act of War: Direct Action expecting an old warhorse that needed to be put down gently, and instead I spent a weekend watching my base evaporate under a Consortium tank column while a cheesy live-action cutscene queued up in the background. That is not an insult. It is practically a recommendation. Eugen Systems built this as a near-future military RTS with three factions: the conventional US Army, the nimble special-ops Task Force Talon, and the shadowy Consortium. Each plays distinctly. The Army needs heavy base investment to unlock its best hardware. Talon units are expensive but mobile and tech-forward. The Consortium floods the field with cheap chaff and counts on volume. The faction asymmetry holds up well, though the Army and Talon share enough unit roles that competitive play at the time largely came down to which side you could micromanage faster. Resource flow runs on a single currency, dollars, generated by oil derricks, bank seizures, and a genuinely clever prisoner mechanic where wounded enemy units can be captured and held for ongoing income. Letting an injured infantryman bleed out when you could be dragging him back for passive cash is the kind of decision that separates good players from sloppy ones. Urban combat is where the game still earns its keep. Snipers posted on upper floors, infantry clearing room by room, tanks trying to suppress a bank building your opponent is using as a revenue node, it creates friction that most RTS games flatten into a blob war. The campaign moves through London, Washington DC, Libya and beyond, authored with input from bestselling techno-thriller writer Dale Brown, and the live-action FMV cutscenes are exactly as campy as you expect and weirdly watchable anyway. The storytelling ranges from genuinely tense to B-movie ham, and the pacing front-loads cutscenes so heavily that early missions feel more like an interactive movie than a strategy game. If you skip them, you will lose track of the plot fast. If you watch them all, be ready to jam Escape a lot. Here is the honest problem for anyone buying this right now: the multiplayer is effectively dead on Steam's native infrastructure. Concurrent player counts sit in the single digits. Community-run GameRanger lobbies exist and do get occasional use, but scheduled sessions rather than drop-in play is the realistic expectation. If you are here for eight-player online skirmishes on a Friday night, this is not the game for that. Skirmish against AI up to difficulty seven is competent and teaches the mechanical side fine, but the AI does not adapt to established economy tricks the way human opponents do, so its ceiling is lower than it looks. The campaign alone runs a healthy length and holds up better than most of its contemporaries, partly because the mission objectives vary enough, hostage extractions, base defense, full assault, that it does not collapse into base-rush repetition. On a modern system, compatibility requires some patience. Running as administrator and checking compatibility settings is standard operating procedure. The Steam release has addressed some of the older network issues but do not expect a frictionless install-and-go experience on Windows 11. For what it is, a well-paced, faction-diverse RTS from Eugen that scored an 82 on Metacritic and sits at a very positive rating on Steam nearly two decades later, it still holds. The multiplayer situation keeps it from being a live recommendation for competitive RTS players, but as a singleplayer campaign with genuine tactical depth and B-movie flair, it delivers more than the price asks for. Fred, Scout Team