Made to Order

The publisher of iconic Final Fantasy series has turned its sights on war, a strategic move requiring western allies to ensure victory. Will "Order of War" succeed?

Square Enix Ltd is best known for its whimsical fantasy role-playing games, notably Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and more recently Star Ocean. An easy way of thinking about Square Enix is effectively the Disney of Video Games - certainly for the Japanese market where every Square Enix RPG is a million-selling blockbuster.

We're less enthralled in the west, and even more so in the UK. The likes of Valkyrie Profile barely trouble the charts even on week one of release. This isn't to say these games are bad, just away from the UK norm - in other words driving and shooting, and specifically World War II shooting as ‘celebrated' in games such as Call of Duty and Brothers in Arms.

Yesterday Square Enix announced Order of War, a World War II real-time strategy game exclusively for Windows PC. Not just a million miles, but another galaxy away from console role-playing games. It looks as though Order of War could be worthy of its stripes however, with ‘strategy game specialist' Wargaming.net onboard for development. The videos and screenshots surely look impressive, and we're promised "massive scale battles brought to life with a cinematic intensity". Quite controversially you'll be able to ride out as the Germans versus Russians in the single-player campaign in addition to the usual US versus Germany scenarios. It will all be based on actual events that took place in WWII from the summer of 1944.

We've seen similar campaigns pay off for Sega in the past, whose Total War series is now huge in the west while games such as Mad World (Wii) die a grisly death. We're certainly looking forward to seeing how Order of War pans out upon its autumn release. But we also think it's appropriate to ask if war is all that we are good for?