Tom Clancy-a-thon part 1 - Tom Clancy's EndWar

Price £30 Publisher Ubisoft Developer Ubisoft Shanghai
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Do you have a microphone connected to your PC? It’s not exactly up there with mouse and keyboard ubiquity, but the humble voice-siphon is increasingly becoming an essential peripheral for PC users. Most mics are used for voice comms in online games, or for talking over Skype, but they can also be used for commanding tiny soldiers. Yes, the unique fragment of cleverness that gives EndWar a reason to exist is that its real-time strategies are powered by your voice. Command your troops by telling them what to do. Just like a real near-future colonel…

Before you’re even allowed to glimpse a battlefield, you must set up the voice commands – so no good will come of trying this game without a microphone. There are rudimentary mouse commands, naturally, but getting anything out of EndWar requires a mic. It’s a peculiar experience. Each word you utter makes up a command sentence. So you might say: “Unit, one, attack, Alpha.” Unit one would then trundle off to raise hell at waypoint Alpha. Or you might say “Unit, two, secure, Bravo,” and unit two would capture Bravo and secure you a victory location. It sounds odd, but this really works. Sure, you might be required to talk a bit like a robot while you’re playing, but it’s a really intuitive, easy-to-comprehend strategic system.

The voice commands also mean that EndWar doesn’t play like other real-time strategies. The co-ordination of troops is fixed around the various waypoints across the map and the behaviour of your enemies. Most of what you do, most of what you can do, in some way relates to the waypoints, thanks to the way the verbal command system works. Consequently this is not a complex RTS. Instead it’s hugely simplified – x beats y, that’s all you need to know. While simple is just fine for most PC gamers – and the trend within RTS games has been moving away from base building for quite some time – it means that EndWar ultimately feels lacking. There’s no extra layer of complexity for you to think about and the missions demand little in the way of complex thought. It’s all about moving the right number of dudes to the right places, using your voice.

It’s impossible not to compare this game with some of the other RTS titles landing in our yard at the moment, such as Dawn Of War 2, World In Conflict: Soviet Assault and Empire: Total War.EndWar looks crude and amateurish next to any and all of them. The Tom Clancy near-future war scenario does nothing to sex-up EndWar’s contemporary-conflict themes, so the whole game ends up coming off like a Command & Conquer effort with all the humour ruthlessly torn out. It’s a drab, silly world stripped bare of any of the pizazz or hyperbole of all its RTS brethren. The nearby relaunch of World In Conflict is a particularly timely nail in the coffin for EndWar: it has a similar stripped down approach to RTS conflict and it’s set in a world that could well have been written by Tom Clancy – well, if he weren’t so exhaustively formulaic. World In Conflict, however, is not constrained by a voice-command mechanism and it’s a pedigree of the genre in every sense. There is no reason whatsoever that you should buy EndWar over the far-superior Soviet Assault.

Ultimately, Ubisoft’s vocal RTS is a brave failure. The central conceit of voice command clearly functions as intended, but the way the game is wrapped around that idea fails to make the game essential, or particularly entertaining. Perhaps it’s the drab Clancy-branded setting, or perhaps it’s the vague feeling of embarrassment produced by blurting “Unit two retreat” when you’ve messed up an attack, only to realise that the game didn’t understand you and neither did your significant other.
Jim Rossignol

PCF 60%

+ Clever gimmick
+ Competently designed (damning with faint praise, Mr. R?)
- Ugly world
- Limited scope

A splendid idea hampered by an average execution and a hideously uninteresting setting.

Needs: Dual-core CPU, 2GB RAM, 256MB SM3.0 card
Wants: Core 2 or above, 4GB RAM, 512MB SM4.0 card

The Tom Clancy-a-thon continues with a review of H.A.W.K.