Tom Clancy’s EndWar
Anything after post SingStar, Dancing Stage, Wii Sports and Wii Fit is surely do-able for today’s gaming hardcore. Gone are the days when you’d hide in the bedroom, lights off, helping Manic Miner collect all his keys or Super Mario rescue Princess Peach. No, today’s active gamer must be more extrovert than Graham Norton when called for but with Tom Clancy’s EndWar this all gets rather serious.
Let’s get these three words out of the way first so we all know what we’re dealing with here: Real Time Strategy. Yes, EndWar is an RTS but one unlike any other because in EndWar you use your voice to command the troops. You stand, or sit, in front of the telly yelling at it until you win or the hostiles decide that’s your Game Over.
This voice command thing isn’t a gimmick either; it’s integral to the whole experience. It could be a stroke of genius, or a horrendous assumption on the designers’ part but our money is on the former. Why? Because the guy heading up this project is Michael de Platter whose last bright idea was the Total War series published by Sega, best known for its appearance on the BBC’s Time Commanders series. But can he be trusted this time? Like, what if I’m from Newcastle or Bacup and nobody south of Birmingham understands a word I’m saying?
Fear not. Well, not about the game being able to understand what you’re saying anyway. We’ve stood by and listened to a succession of appalling English accents instructing EndWar to “Deploy Gunships” and “Create Group, Attack Hostile 19” or whatever and the failure rate was probably 1-100.
It’s certainly as impressive and immersive as de Platter states. To begin with you’ll need to brush up on your Alpha, Tango, Foxtrot, Yankee vocabulary because without these you’re immediately screwed. The mental process of playing an RTS when you’re having to think out loud is very different to squirreling away, dragging and dropping units in a hurry. You still need to think fast, but in order to be effective you can’t loose your cool and get tongue tied. Even when the odds are against you, it’s still necessary to deliver: “Unit 4. Move to. Whisky. Calling all. Gunships. Create Group. Task Force One. Attack. Target” without too much hesitation.
You won’t have an aerial view of the battlefield either under most circumstances. This ability requires a special unit to be deployed that will display a tactical map. Instead you’re constantly requesting, e.g.: “Unit 5. Camera” to see the battle from their perspective. There is a tiny layout of the battlefield for reference in the top-right of the screen, but in order to know exactly which units are being represented by the various green and red dots or triangles you have to get down with the troops.
We played EndWar for over an hour before realising where the time went. And we only stopped playing because the Xbox 360 had called it a day owing to the heat of the Ubidays show floor. Probably we would’ve sat there for another hour asking for more Gunships and holding our breath while Engineers tackled a convoy of enemy transport. EndWar is fascinating from the first minute, and then more and more as each layer is peeled.
The single-player campaigns will be absorbing, we’re quite certain of that. Where EndWar could come unstuck is during online multiplayer battles. Issuing orders is slower when you need to carefully enunciate every syllable, much slower than just thinking and then acting via a mouse and keyboard. It’s actually quite exhausting too, using your brain and your mouth. Don’t laugh; wait until you try it! Assuming, however, that you’ve patience to deal with this radical new interface and prepared to treat it as fun while being perfectly serious with your strategies, EndWar could be astonishing.
EndWar is released for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 this autumn.
