+ Good graphics.
+ Challenging AI.
+ No redundant units.
+ Does not require the original Direct Action to play.

- Campaign not as good as Direct Action.
- Online multiplayer requires 3rd-party software (Hamachi or GameRanger)
- AI does not support all game modes.

The Good
We'll start with the graphics: very good considering this game came out in 2006. The stock maps just as detailed as Direct Action, but with far more variety - Aside from the usual desert and urban maps, you can now play on more forest and jungle theatres.

Infantry play a prominent role right up until the late game. Act of War focuses less on tank rushing and requires the player to think a bit more. Well placed infantry, for example, can ambush a tank convoy from trees/tall grass and gain a x2 damage bonus. Likewise, artillery could be used to clear out forests and potential ambush zones. It's nice to play an RTS where infantry are more than just cannon fodder.

There are some very interesting game mechanics here too. While oil is your main source of income, it is still a finite resource and will run dry eventually. You can take and hold banks to acquire funds, or you can even take wounded enemies as hostages for ransom.

The expansion also adds naval warfare, which actually works rather well once you get the knack for it. Each faction has it's own unique variety of ships with different play styles.

Another interesting mechanic introduced to High Treason is the addition of mercenary units. These are expensive, but very effective specialist units that excel in what they do. For example, you can hire a specialist team of medics to provide a heal radius around wounded infantry - or call in the Rawhide artillery team and level an enemy base with rockets from afar.

The Bad
The AI does not work in naval warfare, which means you're up against humans whether you like it or not. Only a minor complaint, but sometimes it's nice to practice against the AI and hone your skills.

The campaign is brutally hard compared to Direct Action. Some veteran players might be okay with the tougher AI, but I personally struggled. Also the lack of live-action cut-scenes was also a disappointment.

The Ugly
Compatibility issues lie with Windows Vista, Win7 and Win8. There is a Win7 compatibility patch on ModDB which works perfectly - you can get it here

Final Thoughts
Despite the initial compatibility issues, this game has proven to be a very underrated RTS. It's what C&C Generals should have been.

VERDICT: Highly recommended.

If you liked C&C Generals, but:
- It doesn't work on your PC anymore
- You cba to go and get the disk / can't find it / it's so old it's scratched to s***.
- You don't want to buy it electronically on Origin
- You don't want to install Origin
- You don't want to give Origin your monies
- You don't like EA / Origin
- EA / Origin

Then buy this instead. Very similar, a few years newer, and more realistic.

After a much needed update, this game finally works on modern operating systems. There are still some glitches (like I had to verify my files and lost my saves a few times, so be careful) but I managed to finish the game across both Windows 8.1 x64 and Windows 10 x64.

This is a challenging RTS, although I am admittedly not the best strategy player around. Decent graphics, pretty decent storyline, graphics hold up well too.

Grab this one on sale if you can, along with the first game.

Back in the day, it wasn't unusual for expansions to RTS games to increase the difficulty of their solo campaign so I wasn't completely shocked when High Treason started kicking my ass from the start. It took me a while to realize why, however. The AI for friendly units is completely borked. Without direct instructions units seem, as often as not, to become entirely passive. Indeed this sometimes happens to the enemy AI, as well. I've seen countless instances where the two were simply standing next to each, motionless. Mostly, its your units that suffer from this mindless behavior, however, guaranteeing that they get slaughtered unless you've forced them to target an enemy. It's so bad I'm guessing its due to an interaction with either Windows 10 or the multiple cores of my CPU. None of the reviews from when the game was released mention anything about it.
Whatever the cause, High Treason is pretty hard to recommend in 2022. Too bad, because Direct Action is terrific. Buy that one instead.

Act of War: Direct Action has got to be the absolute best Real Time Strategy (RTS) game I've ever played in my entire life - and I'm a HUGE fan of Command and Conquer. The entire franchise.

Act of War: Direct Action had elements I never saw in Command and Conquer. For example, entering buildings was new but you had to first destroy the building or clear the enemy out before re-capturing it. A lot of times once the enemy had it, you couldn't take it from them. Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 is a good example. In Act of War: Direct Action, if an enemy has a building and you want it, you must send in your infantry to fight for it. Your infantry will garrison the building and fight indoors to wrest control over it. Usually whomever has the most units or highest ranking units wins and the survivors are placed outside to be captured or left for dead.

I forgot to mention one of the best features of the game! You can capture wounded enemy infantry or non-combatants like vehicle crews or pilots. On the map, the resource is oil. You will eventually run out of it and once you do, well, you're sort of stuck. You'll get no more money. At all. Unless you have a hospital handy and enough to train some infantry. Wound some enemies, destroy some vehicles, and capture the infantry. Each enemy you capture gives you immediate money plus $50 every ~30 seconds. Each hospital can hold 10 prisoners so that's $500 every ~30 seconds. You can have an unlimited amount of hospitals to gain more and more money.

Units also gain veterancy based on kills and captures. When they attain new veterancy, their health bar increases and they get a small surge of healing/repairing for a few seconds. They also become more deadly.

Not to mention that each faction of the 3 available is unique in its own way. I usually pick favourites in RTS games but not this one. I can't. I absolutely love all 3 factions for different playstyles.

Building in this game was interesting too. The buildings were awesome and the animations for each structure fit amazingly. Airdropping a vehicle? You can watch it do so at no additional cost to wait time - the animation IS part of the wait time. Works for all types of structures.

You could call in airstrikes which I thought was amazing, but could make a game very difficult. There were lots of upgrades, vehicles, and infantry. The game was amazing.

What made it the best for me was how everything reacted to each other. In other games like Command and Conquer, infantry inside of a building could make short work of a tank. In Act of War: Direct Action, a tank takes less damage from small arms fire and can punch holes in structures. If hit in the right spot, can wipe out a small group of garrisoned infantry. Most of the time the building catches fire and it varies in size and can sometimes envelope the entire screen, making it hard to see what's going on. What else? Infantry can be placed on top of buildings - on the roofs. It doesn't really provide any extra cover or other bonuses but it's awesome. Sometimes I like to airdrop mortars on top of structures - like banks - to rain hell on the enemy and protect them from enemy tanks.

I can easily say I put over 1,000 hours into this game during the years I owned it. Of course, I owned it on disc. I still do, actually. I still find it to be the absolute best RTS game out there, right next to Company of Heroes 2 presently for realism.

Pretty much just an expansion of all the above but with added features.

-New campaign which doesn't really add up to the enjoyability of the Direct Action campaign
-New units which are awesome
-Mercenaries
-Ship combat (only for multiplayer unless mods?)
-New maps
-Changed gameplay elements (some are annoying)
-Lots of Engagement customization for playing skirmish against AI.

Otherwise, it's the exact same as above. I only recently bought High Treason a couple years ago but either way, it pretty much gives me Direct Action with more features so I'll play this one. :)

Act of War: Direct Action and Act of War: High Treason are two of the best RTS games out there. Definitely pick them up. Both of them. Play them. Enjoy them. They are classics and you will probably never find anything like this again in your life.

Very cheap too for such an awesome game! :D

P.S.
If you want an awesome campaign, play Direct Action. High Treason's is meh. :) Both games are $6.58CAD, so roughly $5USD? Worth it. :)

In my honest opinion, this is the best base building, old school rts you can get on steam. I've played quite a bit of C&C including tiberium wars, which for a while was my favorite for their variety of units and awesome fighter jet dogfights. Act of War has a very large variety of maps, from vacant cities and towns to open fields and sandy plains. I still haven't played on every map yet. The factions are really awesome and diverse, for example, Task force talon has simple base building and units that are masters at adapting to any situation, units can be further upgraded for unleashing hell on who ever you place the attack order on, while the US army (or murica) have to rely on power sources for their buildings and their units mainly excell in only a few fields having different types of units to deal with what ever the threat may be, infantry, armored or air.

And they recently patched the game so it works for windows 8, this game is a MUST buy for any rts gamer 10/10

I'll preface this with this: I play RTSs for the single player cause i'm a casual fan and bad at them. I've beat AOW a few times on standard (easy) and never had to cheat. Inb4 hurr durr git gud. No.

This game uses different voice actors (confusing), has no FMV cutscenes, is buggy, and is insanely more difficult than the previous game even on standard. 90% of missions refuse to give you base defenses AND a prison/hospital to generate $ from POWs. The enemy will bum rush with sizable deployments from every base non stop with infinite resources. Sometimes infinite respawning enemies just appear out of nowhere. All of this will happen immediately even if your base isn't started. Many times story or intel will be delivered but you're too busy trying to stay alive to pay attention to it.

It's not relaxing casual fun, it's incredibly stressful. The naval ships are the only cool thing about it, and i hate the merc system.

Act of war: High Treason.
Will probely never be better than the orginal Command and Conquer: generals and Zero hour those 2 are my all time favorite. But High Treason for sure is my number 3 because i remember when this came out back in the days, the awesome graphics, the massive fire fights it had, in general all what a RTS needs today.

But let me point out some Pros and cons for this great title.

Pros:
- Extremely good graphics compared to it's time and in generals RTS games. (still has better graphics than many modern trs games)
- The possibility to make huge firefights.
- Building your own bases and launch huge attacks on the enemy
- Naval warfare both in multiplayer, singleplayer (require the Special force mod which allows you to build ships while still having ground forces and buildnings, dont use the Naval invarders as that only allow you 2 play on few maps and with ships only, in the special forces you can control both ground and sea at the same time)
- and extremely balanced air power and super weapons.
- you can capture enemy soldiers it has never been funnier.
- nice phsysics and water simulation.

Cons:
- With out mods the Ai can be a bit easy to handle.
- needs more huge maps like the map called: storm.
- Gamespy dont exist anymore, so no multiplayer (not Atari's fault ofcouse)
- Takes really long time to load a skirmish map (dont know if that is only me?)

But this game will be worth buying as you wont regret it, it is looking good, the sounds VFX is good really giving you this military feeling, and on G 2 play you can buy this game for 2 Euro so pick it up there if you want to spare money, but 9,99 Euro is also not bad for such a great classic.

***EDIT***
can see the developers changed the price of the game after they saw my review, so they changed it from 9.99 to 2.99 which is an really good price for an old great game, that has lost multiplayer function, but still is really great on singleplayer.
So thank you Devs, for reading my review, i have always been a huge fan of the act war serie.

The sequal to Act of War Direct Action, I bought the DVD version back in 2006. so even Steam registered me only played less than an hour, I believe I can still write a fair review.

first of all, you do not need to have AoW: DA installed to play. however

Act of War: High Treason follows the TFT commander Jason Richter to discover and prevent a political scheme. Fight against the old enemy of Consortium and on few instances, the US military.

This sequal carries on the innovative system from AoW DA, where wounded infantry and downed pilot become part of the economy syetm in the game. It comes with new units and new campaign. the new units adds several tactical options for each factions. making it more interesting to play. However the missions are not as well designed as those in Direct Action: some comes with odd restriction and conditions, making it just too difficult to beat. New units includes Naval units, but only available in certian mission and some multiplayer maps.

AoW: HT adds Mercenary system, where carefully deployed Mercenaries can turn the tide of the battle. Be warned, it cost a lot to deploy mercenaries so use it wisely.

Gone are the good Live action cutscene, replaced with CG. I do not believe this was voiced by original actor either. the charactor in this is more playful and the charactors in Direct Action are more collected, focused and let's say, "no nonsense".

One improvement over Direct Action is: HT supports widescreen, 16:9 resolution. Keep in mind, this is after all a 2005/2006 game so don't expect to have top notch graphics from modern game engine. However it is still a fun game to play.

When it first launched on Steam, like Direct action, it suffered from memory addressing issue, but I believe it is now fixed. as I am able to play it with windows 8.1, i7 processor and 12GB of ram without any modification.

This game is alright, but the campaign is incredibly difficult to the point of almost not being fun, even on the easiest setting.