In one match, your skill may help you overcome a player of your same level. To make matters worse, WorldShift features no kind of level-based matchmaking system, you won't know if you're playing against a newbie player or a veteran with high-level units until you meet them on the battlefield. But new players won't be stepping onto a level playing field WorldShift was released a year ago in many European countries.

Since WorldShift feature an MMO-style skill progression, the more you play, the more powerful you can make your units. Multiplayer removes some of the campaign's frustrations like the pitiful enemy AI, only to swap it for a major new problem: balance. The story is clichÃ© and boring, and the mission objectives are laughably bad, often involving avoiding enemies with stealth – no easy feat with your units' broken pathfinding. Removing base-building may make the gameplay easier for new players, but removes any sort of strategy at all – there's no balance between attack and defense you'll simply always be massing your forces into one large offensive unit and hunting down the bad guys. That's the concept, anyway.WorldShift was clearly designed with multiplayer in mind (you have to create an online account to even launch the game), and the single-player campaign is so bad that few players will muscle through it before heading online. The twist to the gameplay is that you discover artifacts in every game mode that you can use to permanently buff your units, so you're constantly improving the abilities of your army, which you can then take online to battle with or against other players.

You control a group of characters that you steer around the map, right-clicking on everything you want to kill along the way. Set in a post-apocalyptic world dominated by the technology-based humans, nature-worshipping Tribe and sinister Cult, WorldShift is, at its core, a very simple RTS with all base-building elements removed. As clever as WorldShift's core concept may be, the gameplay is as flat as its 'technology versus magic' story. However, good intentions don't necessarily make for fun gameplay. WorldShift is just such a game, one based on an interesting core concept that attempts something unique by melding the gameplay of an RTS with the persistence of an MMO. Sometimes you have to give developers points for their vision and their ideas, especially when they try something new and creative. Some games are easier to admire than to actually enjoy. As it is, it's just another mediocre game that began with a great idea. With some more depth to the gameplay and a better online matchmaking mechanic, WorldShift could have been an interesting evolution in the RTS genre. There's little strategy to the matches other than using the small handful of special abilities against the toughest enemies first. Even if there was a more fair matchmaking system, the core gameplay is just too simple for experienced RTS players. The concept of an RTS with an online RPG is a great one, but too many factors hold it back from reaching the height of that concept's appeal. The worst thing about WorldShift is its unfulfilled potential.

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