Tom Clancy's EndWar Preview

There have been a lot of games that have dealt with World War III, where the world is divided into a number of factions and each is vying for supremacy. So what makes Tom Clancy’s EndWar for the PS3 any different? Well, how about this: instead of using the PlayStation 3 controller to select your units, then earmark where you wish them to move and what you want them to do when they get there, EndWar integrates voice commands. You are the Colonel in charge of the operation and you speak your commands into the Logitech Vantage USB Headset for the PS3.

For example … as the game’s intro cleverly demonstrates, you have two groups of gunships over the visceral mapboard. There are tanks below, attacking ground troops. You hold down the R2 shoulder button and speak clearly:

“Unit 1 attack Hostile 3.”

The gunships stop hovering, move toward their objective take up position and start blasting away. It is intuitive, exciting and brings a level of gameplay to the RTS genre that is involving and evolving. No longer will players have to fumble with controllers. All you have to do is remain calm and level headed, scanning the battlefield and remembering the rock-paper-scissors format that the game employs – gunships kill tanks, tanks kill transports and transports kill gunships. Of course, if it were that simple, this game would have no depth. There are a host of other commands that come into play, like deploying the camera, calling in surgical strikes and WMDs … all in all, this is an incredibly enjoyable adventure.

Clancy’s EndWar follows a familiar scenario … In 2016 nuclear terrorists hit Saudi Arabia, wiping out the oil supplies for the world and throwing unlikely unions together. There is the United States of Europe with its Enforcer Core, the United States (the North American kind) with its Joint Strike Force and Russia with the Spetsnaz Guard Brigade. By the year 2020, the U.S. had established space supremacy, but this merely put the rest of the world on edge and precipitated World War III.

Players can tackle EndWar in one of three modes. Theater of War is a massively multiplayer online campaign with rolling maps, orders of battle and players up to their eyeballs in trying to grab territory from the others. Skirmish is a single-player or multiplayer mission that can take place on any territory in the game. The solo campaign is the place to get your feet wet, learn how to deal with your forces and how to approach the voice command system. It begins with tutorial missions that ramp up in difficulty, increasing in number of units on the mapboard while overlaying an objective for players that act as the condition of victory. This goes under the moniker of Prelude to War.

The game actually begins with a quick overview of the voice command system and tests voice input in the headset. You don’t have to shout, but actually maintaining a normal talking voice is best. The game reads the commands and through quite a number of scenarios, it did exactly as ordered, regardless of how inane those commands were.

And what that translates to is less hand work with the controller. You can use it to deploy more units when the time becomes available to pull in more, but most of what you will do will be tied to the R2 button and your voice.

As one can imagine, the sound of the game – considering that it depends so much on the sound of your voice to control it – is very good, but so are the graphics. This is a real-time game, so everything happens and rolls along whether you are paying attention or not. That means vigilance is important. There are some ‘jaggies’ in some superfluous environmental elements but nothing to get nervous about. This was a pre-release build that was sent along by Ubisoft and the graphics might change moderately in the final release. But what is important in a game like this are the animations, more so than environmental decorations. The effects are solid, and the units move very well.

Tom Clancy’s EndWar is a wonderful stride forward for the RTS genre. The game releases on Nov. 4 and GZ will have a review of it, but whether you are an RTS fan or not, this is a game that may either lure you into the genre as a newcomer, or just thrill you to death if you are a fan.