When a game is released touting a unique method of gameplay, one's natural inclination is to be skeptical. Gamers have been promised a number of revolutions in control mechanics as of late, and far too often, what we ultimately receive are poorly-used motion controls, poorly-used touch controls, or pointless and gimmicky butt controls. Ubisoft set my cynic-senses tingling when, back in May, they demonstrated Tom Clancy's EndWar as being completely controllable via voice commands. Thus, when my review copy of EndWar arrived, I prepared myself to slog through the fancy new voice-control system for a while to see how it worked, and then evaluate the rest of the near-future real-time strategy game without it.
After playing EndWar for the entire length of the solo campaign and beyond, I still haven't bothered to learn how to play the game without voice commands; that's how well they work.
Let me begin by issuing an apology to Ubisoft Shanghai for ever doubting their voice control scheme as a gimmick. When EndWar claims that it can be played "without using a controller," that is only a slight exaggeration. You'll need the controller to swing the camera around, and to tell the game when you're actually issuing a voice command -- and between missions, you'll need to tap a few buttons -- but that's really about it. I've now barked hundreds of orders to my troops through the basic Xbox 360 headset, and EndWar has only misunderstood me two or three times. Considering my past experiences with voice-controlled game attempts, I'm utterly blown away by the execution in this title.
You may be familiar with a PS2 game by the name of Lifeline. Lifeline, too, promised the unique ability to guide the gameplay with one's voice, but instead delivered a system which barely understood English. "Go to the door. No, don't search the desk, go to the door. Go to the door. Hey! GO TO THE DOOR! I hate you and I hope the aliens eat your eyes." As the years wore on, voice-commanded games didn't seem to improve much in the comprehension department, if Brain Age on the DS was any indication. "Blue. Blue. Blue. Blue. The color is Blue. How do you not understand the word 'blue?!' BLUE! I hate you and I hope the aliens eat your eyes."
EndWar's vocal recognition, by comparison, is nearly flawless, showing a polished, easy-to-learn, intuitive system that actually outperforms standard controller input. It's amazing how well the system fits the game, allowing EndWar to execute fast-paced, exciting RTS gameplay without keeping players scrambling to keep up through dozens of context menus and unit selections.
As an RTS, all of the standard mechanics are present: A diverse selection of units, each with special abilities, strengths, and weaknesses, who must be deployed and repositioned, rapidly and repeatedly, in response to enemy movements on the battlefield. This is frequently an RTS' greatest failing when played on a console -- the gameplay starts to really slow down when players don't have access to a mouse to instantly click their intended unit and select an order, instead having to scroll through their myriad choices while the enemy chews them to pieces. An order in EndWar, on the other hand, can be delivered aloud in just one second.
Those orders, once spoken, are recognized and executed instantly; there is no slowdown to interpret and process your command, and there is no delay in changing the on-screen action. EndWar keeps the system idiot-proof by relegating your commands to a series of contextual keywords, so there's never any question of what your orders are, and once you've spent just a few minutes learning those words, you can orchestrate your troop movements like a genuine armchair general. "Unit five, secure bravo. Deploy gunships. Calling all tanks, attack hostile two. Sitrep!" I scarcely had to pause in between these various commands, watching in delight as my battalion swept across the battlefield to engage our objectives on multiple fronts.
The battlefields themselves are varied and impressive, ranging from destructible urban environments to sprawling countrysides as players fight their way across Europe and North America. This being a Tom Clancy game, the premise is quite familiar: It's the year 2020, and energy crises, terrorism, and advanced weapons proliferation have plunged humanity into World War III, with America, Russia, and an evolved European Union representing the three supreme factions. In the single-player campaign, gamers will have to select one of these factions, and choose their battles across a series of contested territories, pushing their way through enemy lines to seize strategic resources and draw closer to ultimate victory. The first faction to control a certain number of territories, or to control all three capital cities, claims control of the globe.
I carved a bloody swath through the world as the diabolical Russians, fighting my battles in the lush hills of Western Europe, and finishing my deadly offense on the streets of Washington, DC, complete with a strategically useful White House. The environments in EndWar's levels are highly interactive, including wide-open expanses for your vehicles to quickly traverse, and tactical cover such as trees and buildings for your footsoldiers to fortify. Of course, if your enemy's cover is proving to be a nuisance, you can blast the hell out of it; most of the interactive world elements are also destructible.
Any unit can be specifically ordered to move to a pinpoint location on the map, or to make use of any specifically selected piece of cover, which opens up quite a number of strategic choices to the player. In a pitched battle, one frequently doesn't have time to come up with a terribly devious plan, but from skirmish to skirmish, a clever player can turn the tide of battle with a quick decision -- and it's usually these little extra choices that will decide the match, given how simple the actual strategic elements are.
EndWar does not re-invent the RTS mechanic, by any means. If you've played Advance Wars or any other unit-based strategy game over the last 5-10 years, you already have a grasp of the basic rock-paper-scissors interaction of your troops. At the most basic level, in one-on-one combat, your big durable tanks will usually triumph over the fast-moving transports, but the transports' rapid fire will make short work of the airborne gunships, yet the maneuverable gunships will blast tanks to pieces with their missiles. EndWar also drops a few other familiar faces into the mix: Long-range artillery vehicles, a high-tech support/command convoy, and highly vulnerable infantry units which can secure mission-crucial assets. Again, RTS veterans will already know the proper use of these units the moment they are introduced, but that doesn't make them any less fun to play with.
Four different mission goals keep players on their toes, including "destroy the enemy's critical objectives," "defend the critical objective until help arrives," and the good old-fashioned "kill 'em all," but the majority of the gameplay centers around movement and combat in the service of securing "Uplinks," EndWar's equivalent of capture points (à la Battlefield or Team Fortress 2). These do actually make sense within the context of the game; these structures house the communications equipment to access the dizzying array of satellites and troop support networks available in the year 2020. Capturing and upgrading Uplinks with one's ground troops will allow players to gain access to tactics such as air strikes, EMPs, and more, making the structures highly desirable. In addition, the most frequently used game mode turns the Uplinks into a game mechanic: Once a player has seized over half the Uplinks in a map, he will win the match if he can hold them for a few minutes. This forces the other player to go on the offensive to try and recapture them, preventing a battle from turning into a "no, you come over here" stalemate.
Once a player knows his way around the battlefield, the gameplay in EndWar becomes extremely tense and engaging. Since the game allows you to issue orders in the blink of an eye, the computer doesn't waste any time moving its own troops, forcing you to keep a close eye on several situations at once, driving up the frantic multitasking that RTS games are known for. The game's perspective, unlike most RTS titles, tends to focus on the units' one-to-one combat, keeping the camera locked on a single unit. This allows the game to show off its impressive detail, allowing you to zoom in on individual vehicles or soldiers, and watch as they jump behind cover, work to drag their wounded comrades out of fire, and so on, giving the fight a real sense of urgency.
One would think this perspective, focusing on a single unit, would be extremely poor for a strategy title, inherently based around coordinating a dozen units at once. Amazingly, though, thanks to some excellent interface design, the system works very well. Beyond a simple colored-squares-and-triangles mini-map which is displayed at all times, an informative taskbar at the bottom of the screen helps players keep track of who's doing what. Each unit shows icons which communicate the unit type, the unit's remaining health, and its current orders -- a simple arrow for "moving," a red arrow and unit number for "attacking," a large letter to indicate its location at a mission objective (named Alpha, Foxtrot, Whiskey, or the like), and so on. If a unit doesn't have an 'order' icon, a player will know his unit is sitting idle, and will know to reassess its position.
In addition, snapping the focus to a different unit is accomplished with a single voice command, allowing players to quickly keep track of trouble. If a unit starts flashing red due to enemy attack, or reaches its current objective, all a commander needs to do is bark out "Unit Eight, Camera!" and receive a close-up view of the action. Or, for strategists who simply must have a full view of the battlefield, adding a command vehicle to one's forces allows a player to call out "Sitrep!" and take command of the field view, seeing the entire level in a simplified, top-down representation. Players can continue to give orders from this feature, allowing one to watch the battle unfold like a real-time game of Risk -- unless the command vehicle is destroyed, of course.
Beyond the obvious reasons to avoid losing units on the battlefield, EndWar takes things a step further by making one's forces persistent across the campaign. At the end of a battle, any units who performed well -- and were still active at the end -- may receive a promotion, granting those units statistical bonuses for future battles. In addition, promoted units become eligible for upgrades, including attack/defense bonuses and special abilities (stealth, anyone?) which can be purchased with your army's funds -- funds you will be awarded based on your performance in battle. As the war rages on, this allows players' troops to continually improve, raising their abilities to match the rising difficulty. Mind you, an army will not simply whittle down to nothing if their units are killed; a unit who dies in battle will be replaced between missions, albeit with fresh recruits, devoid of any experience-granted upgrades. This, too, lends some strategy to things when choosing units before a battle: Do you pick your lower-ranked units in hopes of building them up, or do you go with seasoned veterans for battle bonuses that you may well lose during the fight?
Building up a respectable army adds an enjoyable depth to the overall campaign, which might otherwise have simply been a between-fights menu screen, centered entirely around where to fight next. Instead, players will have to think ahead slightly, deciding whether to spend their upgrade money on basic troop upgrades, or save up for the expensive stuff like better air strikes -- while considering whether those upgrades need to be in place by the time they capture that airfield for later strike support. Conquering the world on the game's "normal" difficulty level will last players 6-8 hours, and while early battles can be pretty easily steamrolled by the average RTS player, one can expect the AI to put up a serious fight when trying to seize their capital city. If that's not enough, of course, EndWar comes with two harder difficulty levels, as well.
Of course, an RTS game isn't complete without a human opponent to outwit, and EndWar's multiplayer mode is an especially enticing proposition. The game can, naturally, be played in a "quick match" skirmish, allowing players to go head-to-head (or 2v2) on a map and in a mode of their choice. The gameplay suffers a little bit when playing online, but not enough to hamper the experience: Voice commands take a second or two to register with your troops, as opposed to the instantaneous response enjoyed in the single-player mode. Still, the delay is not problematic, and the satisfaction of crushing a player-controlled army is as fun as ever.
Far more interesting, however, is the game's "Theater of War" mode, which takes the overarching world conquest and persistent army building of the single-player campaign, and throws open the multiplayer floodgates. Theater of War presents gamers with an ongoing online campaign, allowing three player factions to fight battles over the contested regions du jour. Players can join up with the US, Europe, or Russia (though, in a clever attempt at game balance, players are offered an upgrading jump-start if they choose the losing faction). The world map works precisely as it does in the single-player game, except that instead of advancing the global situation immediately, players can fight over the contested zones, again and again, against players of the appropriate faction.
At the end of the real-world day, the map will progress to show the results, and the consequential new contested areas, meaning that if you and your teammates have been winning your matches, your faction will have more territories and resources to work with. It's an interesting mix of MMO-style realm vs. realm gameplay with fast-paced RTS combat, and the ability to keep a persistent army and record -- in essence, to create a "character" in EndWar -- should genuinely excite hardcore strategy devotees.
It's been a long time since an RTS title really ensnared me, let alone an RTS on a console, but there are simply so many things that EndWar does right. The voice command system is flawless, and should be used as the high watermark for other games intending to use vocal input. The strategy is simple to grasp and easy to make use of, which excellently complements the fast, exciting pace of the battle. The graphics are quite impressive for the genre, yet the smooth interface allows players to follow the action as well as they would in a simpler presentation.
Even the little things are done right in EndWar. Finding the difficulty too easy or too hard? You don't have to start the whole campaign over; you can switch it between battles. Grinding your way towards certain achievements? The game auto-saves, but you can also maintain individual save files at any point during the campaign, so you don't have to start over there, either. Don't want to shout your orders out loud, for fear of scaring the neighbors? The voice command system is a gem, but you can still use a controller if you want. You can even save replays of your best battles and relive your moments of glory.
EndWar does not reinvent the RTS, but it deserves high praise for the polish and refinement that it brings to the familiar gameplay. It's quite solid in terms of game design, it's a blast to play, and it proves, without question, that an RTS title can work on a console. I don't impress easily, but when I do, I'm glad to grant a game like EndWar the GameCyte Seal of Approval. Look for our giveaway soon!
EndWar is available now for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. A turn-based variant is also available on the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable, and the PC version is due out in 2009.
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