This game is based on The War of the Worlds, but heavily influenced by Jeff Wayne's Musical version in its art style. It also has remixes of the music from the musical version. It is single player only.

It is a Real-Time Strategy game. The player chooses to play as either the Humans or the invading Martians. It was unusual at the time, as instead of having pre-set missions, battles only take place when one sides' forces are sent to a sector occupied by the other. Unit building and the inter-sector movement of forces is done between battles. In this respect, it is somewhat similar to the NES game North & South .

The game takes place in late 19th century Great Britain. The map of Britain (the "War map") is divided into approximately 40 sectors. Each sector held by the players forces can be examined in detail in a separate "Battle map". The player can set up unit and structure building tasks and queues here. Time only passes on the War map. Research tasks are set on the War map as well.

Unlike most RTS computer games, units typically consist of multiple vehicles, except for highly specialised or utility units. The Martians use large powerful weapons, that can take a lot of damage. The Humans have weaker vehicles, but have more per unit, and quicker build times. Playing on the Martain side, players can expect to be attacked by more than a hundred human vehicles in a single battle, on some occasions. The Humans can build water units, such as Ironclads, which can devastate Martian defences, while requiring the Martian forces to wade out into the ocean to retaliate. The Martians can build some extremely specialised vehicles, some of which can constrict Human forces. Some can even affect Humans psionically.

Resource usage is different from the trend of the time. There are no gathering units that manually gather resources, and the resources are not used to build or purchase units. Instead, each sector has three resources (which differ for the Humans and Martians), in certain levels of abundance. Players can build facilities that will extract these resources at a certain rate. Each unit and manufacturing or repair facility in the game uses certain amounts of the resources depending on the resource type (Martain buildings don't need to feed on human blood, for example, while units do), and the action currently being performed. These resources are drawn from the sector the building or unit is in, and the sectors directly surrounding it. Deficiencies in resources will result in decreased efficiency, and increased time for unit/structure building and repairs.

It was one of the earlier RTS games to use 3D models instead of sprites for units. The game also features 3D terrain, which can be used strategically. The game suffered from significant performance problems initially, mainly due to the sheer amount of vehicles on screen (often thanks to the Humans). However, modern computers should have no trouble keeping up.