Tom Clancy's EndWar review (X360)

Oops. Yes I know this review is rather late. If it had been a Boomtown writer delivering this one so late we'd have rigged a grating and he'd had the customary 12 lashes. But things being what they are, I'm the captain of the ship, I'll just have to plead my case to a court marshal. Look, Christmas crept up on me and we were rather busy, so some reviews are a little delayed. Let's get on shall we.

EndWar is a game I played a lot during 2008 at various press events including Ubisoft's Ubidays conference in Paris. It was clear from those short sessions the game was a fun and interesting take on the strategy genre but questions remained in my mind of its longevity and depth.

I was pretty much right to doubt the game. Yes it's fun and I can recommend it, but with some caveats. We'll come to those soon, but first let's take a look at what the game does get right.

Speak Your Brains

EndWar tells the tale of typically Clancyesqe bonkers paranoid conflict between the major superpowers. In this case we Eurotrash actually get to fight against the imperialist running dog lackey Yankees at some points, which makes for a very pleasant change.

The story begins with some guff about the effectiveness of anti-ballistic missile technology which means that even in the near future wars will be fought with twenty guys and a couple of tanks. Phew that's a relief, we wouldn't want a console audience to have to deal with battles between the kind of massed forces Wellington could command.

And thus we're thrust into battle after battle of Command & Conquer style battles, trying to capture points on the map and wipe out one's enemies. So far so funky. It looks fab, sounds fab and is suitably noisy and full of explosions.

Even better we get to control the mayhem via some fancy voice recognition. And the clever thing is. It really works and it's not just a gimmick. Giving orders to faraway units in trouble takes moments via this system, just pull the right trigger and speak. It really is as simple as that - which really helps you keep things together in the heat of battle with units engaged in different skirmishes across the map. This gameplay method really has legs and one hopes Ubisoft really builds upon it for future games.

Underpopulated

What isn't so great about EndWar is the simplicity of the underlying gameplay beneath the apparent visual and voice control complexity. Here we are in...well I started this review in 2008...and despite the many detailed and clever strategy games we've seen on PC we're still being fed simplistic rock, paper, scissors nonsense on consoles.

The loading screens even make a virtue of this. They show how tanks beat infantry, infantry beat choppers and choppers beat tanks. And that my friend is the entire strategy guide you need to play EndWar.

This is somewhat galling. When I call in a unit of high-tech American attack helicopters I expect them to do what I've seen them do in Iraq, no not shoot British soldiers by mistake, but make perforated scrap out of enemy armoured transports. But not in this game. Choppers will shred tanks, but lightly armed APCs will wipe out choppers. Not a surprise when choppers hover dumbly over the battlefield offering easy targets.

EndWar paints a picture in mission screens, unit graphics and the underlying look of the game that there's some deep and authentic strategy withint. But it's the same kind of simplistic rock, paper, scissors stuff we abandoned years ago on PC in favour of some depth.

Final Thoughts

I really wanted to like EndWar a lot more than I did. It's a game that in theory should be right up my street. I'm a huge fan of the Ghost Recon series and strategy games as a whole. But I think EndWar wasn't made for me. We were lead to believe that EndWar would be a grand strategy game where you controlled tens of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter type units, but that's really not what we've got.

Multiplayer is good fun if played with friends who don't quite when they are losing. And on the whole good fun sums up EndWar.

It's just that EndWar isn't the game it could or should have been. The brilliance of the voice control - and believe me it is brilliant - should have been combined with something as epic as the battles in the Total War series.

Developers have struggled to create control methods that would allow console games to host the kind of strategy games the PC enjoys. Here Ubisoft has nailed it. So it's just a shame that the strategy game that was tacked onto it is so light.