• Publisher: Atari
  • Release Date: Mar 15, 2005
Act of War: Direct Action Image
  • Summary: Act of War: Direct Action tells a highly realistic, near-future story of a US elite force fighting an international plot to overthrow the current world order. While offering a "First Look at Tomorrow's War", the game takes you through a frightening and believable reality filled with suspense, international intrigue and geopolitical military conflict, wrapped in a top-quality strategy gaming experience. Act of War: Direct Action offers players the opportunity to zoom in and engage in the battle from street level perspective on urban battlefields such as San Francisco, Washington DC, London and Moscow, with incredible detail and without slowing down any of the action. Act of War features a single-player story mode and various multiplayer modes including 8-player online skirmishes. [Atari] Expand
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 38 out of 43
  2. Negative: 0 out of 43
  1. Act of War beautfiully bridges the gap between action and strategy and provides an all out assault of the senses thanks to the incredble level of visual detail, intuitive control and an aural symphony comprised of the sounds of destruction.
  2. A stunning debut for what's obviously going to be a hell of a franchise.
  3. Will it make you rethink how you see strategy games? Don't be daft. Will you enjoy playing it? Almost certainly. [May 2005, p.88]

See all 43 Critic Reviews

Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8 out of 8
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 8
  3. Negative: 0 out of 8
  1. I played this RTS religiously for about a year before I moved on and found out about Dawn of War. Anybody who likes RTSs at all should try this little-known gem from Atari. To put it simply, Act of War is in my opinion the perfect Command and Conquer game. It takes everything that made Command and Conquer great and dials it up to 11. This is strange because Act of War isn't actually an official Command and Conquer game. IMO, Act of War got exactly the right scale of combat. With DoW 2, you have small intimate squad battles. With Supreme Commander, you've got a ginormous scale with epic battles across entire peninsulas. Act of War had the perfect average of scale with good infantry action (even inside buildings!), while also allowing for devastating nuclear strikes and massed tank rushes. They even managed to pull off air combat in an innovative realistic fashion, which Relic later mimicked in CoH. Even Command and Conquer 3 came out later and tried to follow the magic and execution of Act of War, but I think they fell short. About the *only* complaint I can ever make about Act of War is that the infantry are individual units rather then squads, but I played it before DoW so that didn't bother me at the time. Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  2. This game is awesome. It is one of my favourite games of all time up there with homeworld 2. Both of these games are so great i find it hard to decide which is the ultimate. These guys really stepped in and picked up where westwood dropped the ball, dropped the live action cutscenes and went "in game 3d" Expand
    • 0 of 0 users said yes
  3. Yuri
    10
    If you thought c&c:generals was good, think again.
    • 1 of 1 users said yes

See all 8 User Reviews