I think it's probably safe to say that I'm a big fan of RTS (or real-time strategy) games, partly due to the fact that some of the great older strategy games (the Age of Empires series, Total Annihilation and StarCraft) are amongst the few games that actually run on my now-quite-ageing laptop. For this reason, there were two games in particular that I wanted to spend some time with at the Expo: Savage Moon, a PSN tower defence game that I'll be talking about soon, and the latest in the never-ending line of Tom Clancy games: EndWar.
The background of this game is a time when there is not enough oil to go around, and therefore the US, the Europeans and Russia have all decided to have a nuclear food fight amongst themselves in an attempt to secure the remaining supplies. And of course, this all happens in a nice grey near-future setting.
The beauty of EndWar, however, is not in its setting or backstory, but instead in the way the game is played. EndWar is almost entirely playable using only a headset (Bluetooth or USB; SingStar or Rock Band microphones work equally as well, but a headset is much less fiddly believe me). It works like this: you hold down the the R2 shoulder button/trigger and navigate the tree menu that appears using your voice. For instance, should you wish to move your tanks (which you have rather intelligently assigned to slot two) to waypoint Delta on the map, you say, simply: "Unit - 2 - move to - Delta". Its a very easy way to work out what you want to say, as only saying part of a command will bring up the menu to that point, so you can then pick the unit you want to move, hostile you want to attack or whatnot. There are a few tasks that require a pad, such as adding support troops and switching up your units, but this requires only the directional and the X button.
And the voice recognition is amazingly good. In fact, in the crowded nerd-filled room I was playing, next to three other players also shouting into headsets, and the regular bursts of "ooohs" from the sealed Gears of War 2 cubicle just along, the game had no problem picking up what I was saying perfectly. Admittedly, the demo I later played with my SingStar mic was not as good, but this is more down to the quality of the microphone than any fault of the game's. But, should you find yourself in a situation in which you don't fancy shouting your head off at crazed Russians, you can play the whole game using a gamepad, navigating the aforementioned tree menus using the directional buttons, but this takes away a large amount of the fun of the game.
Amongst others, one of the game types I played was Conquest, in which you simply try to take and hold more specific targets on the map than your enemy, and others on offer involved swanning into an area and taking everyone out to claim it, and defending your bases from incoming attacks. And this is where I can see the cracks in the game: the gameplay and unique feature is pretty-much perfect, but it is just being used in very generic situations, which could easily become very repetitive when stretched out over both an entire campaign mode and EndWar's innovative online play that recalculates areas of control every day based on the matches and skirmishes that have taken place.
Although I though it was a great session that I spent with the game, I think that is how it will likely be best played come the final release - in short sharp bursts. There are a couple of other niggles I had with the game, bearing in mind we were playing a near-complete, if not complete, version of the game (Tropies had been implemented - I unlocked a nice bronze one during one of my plays of the game): the loading times are near rediculous, with multiple screens that all disguise the fact the level is still bloody loading, and the minimap displays only the letters of checkpoints, so you better know your phonetic alphabet before you start issuing orders (after a good old shouting session, we realised B was for Bravo, not Beta). The game has enormous potential, and I will be glad to get some more hands-on time with the final game in the future.
Tom Clancy's EndWar is developed by Ubisoft Shanghai and published by Ubisoft. It was released on November 8th in the UK on PlayStation 3, and a special edition PS3 version bundled with the new official Bluetooth headset is also available. A downloadable demo is currently available on the PlayStation Store and Xbox Live Marketplace. A PC version of the game is slated for next year.
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