Clancy's 'EndWar' good for consoles

• By MILES THORPE
• 2theadvocate.com staff
• Published: Dec 10, 2008 - UPDATED: 1:18 p.m.

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While strategy games still aren’t that big on consoles, “Tom Clancy’s EndWar” brings a noticeable nudge in the right direction with its voice-activated command system. Allowing the user to not only use the controller to pan around the battlefield and issue commands but to also be able to tell individual squads where to go and what to do verbally helps keep the gameplay flowing.

As “EndWar” opens, the world has already been thrust into a third World War. With global hotspots and key locations to capture, the player hits the ground running from the first mission.

There is a tutorial included, but instead of the standard training field where some games tend to bore the player with the mundane tasks of ‘how to select a unit,’ in “EndWar” the player actually plays through the events that lead to the start of World War III. This is a nice touch and helps build a little mood for the missions ahead.

“EndWar” is not a shooter title like other Tom Clancy labeled games and is a strategy game that has you commanding several different kinds of units around the battlefield. The units in the game -- like riflemen, engineers, tanks and helicopters -- all work under a rock-paper-scissors system. Helicopters beat tanks, tanks beat soldiers, soldiers beat transports, transports beat helicopters. While the very basic cycle works, it does limit getting out of a bad situation when the game knows your tanks are going to get obliterated by those enemy choppers no matter what you do. To me this limits some of the player’s creativity.

The main highlight of “EndWar” is the voice command system. With the use of an Xbox 360 headset the player can actually speak commands to the squads and units and issue them orders. The commands are fairly simplistic in nature resulting in a ‘Who’ goes ‘Where’ and does ‘What’ format. A sample voice command would be to say “Unit One move to waypoint Alpha”. The units in-game then respond with a confirmation and begin to move to the Alpha waypoint. If you give a command that is not recognized the game responds with an error message stating as such and to try again.

As your troops move across the battlefields you will need to capture uplink locations. These are vital in building your reinforcements meter which will then allow you to call in more troops or vehicles to the battle. Only foot soldiers can capture uplink locations and most uplink locations are guarded with simple robotic drones.

Graphically the game world looks good. There isn’t much detail in the environments but your tanks and soldiers look good running around the battlefield. Missiles zoom around, tanks explode, and helicopters spin out-of-control and crash with delight.

The sound effects are well-done and are of high quality. Aside from the bullets and explosions there is also spoken dialogue from all the game units as well as the mission briefing screens prior to battle. All of the voice acting that I heard sounded good.

There are three different campaigns you can work through in the game. You can choose from Americans, Russians or Europeans. Each of the campaigns have pretty much the same objective: Conquer the planet.

The game does present several fights happening on a single battlefield at once but the individual battles take what feels like minutes rather than seconds to destroy a single unit. Also, having to tell a unit to attack an enemy as it drives past them seems a little silly. I would’ve hoped my tanks would, while moving to a waypoint, have enough sense to shoot the enemy transports that are driving past them.

While I’m the first to admit that although I enjoy strategy games very much, I am not very good at them. With that said, “Tom Clancy’s EndWar” came across as a slightly uninspired game. The lack of any real plot or storyline didn’t help either.