Tom Clancy’s EndWar
Extra development time doesn’t always result in better games – that much is for certain. But in the case of Tom Clancy’s EndWar, whose developer Ubisoft Shanghai was afforded an extra few months to spend tweaking and polishing thanks to the financial success of Assassin’s Creed, it may well have made the difference between a good game and a great one.
This is, of course, the futuristic strategy wargame that’s looking to not only replicate the depth and control of traditional PC titles in the genre, but also confidently surpass them through a combination of adding new and exciting features, and streamlining and reducing old ones.
EndWar’s big idea is voice control. This is a game played almost entirely with speech. 40-odd phrases can be combined in different ways to order your troops around maps, attacking, defending and retreating in a system of staggering flexibility and, perhaps surprisingly, accuracy.
The feature has been honed, polished, checked and improved to the extent that, however unusual your accent or strange your pronunciation, the game will almost always interpret your commands correctly. It doesn’t take long to get to grips with the basics: “Deploy Artillery”, “Unit 2 secure Foxtrot”, “Gunship Create group” and in no time you’ll be barking commands like a front room general. In testament to the team’s vision, it never, ever feels like a gimmick.
Ubisoft have done a great job of translating the outworking of these commands to screen in a compelling way. You can zoom right in on the action, watching as your artillery fire hits its target before zooming off to take control of another area of the battlefield. In fact, so exciting is the action that you’ll frequently get distracted just watching the battlefield scenes unfold, when really you should be hurtling around taking care of your other troops.
The game is set in 2020, in the midst of a nuclear World War III between Europe with the US and Russia. The dialogue and framing of the narrative is predictably po-faced, but it does suit the rather grim setting, and the single player campaign is reckoned, by Ubisoft’s estimation, to last for around 20 hours.
The team has spent a lot of time on the multiplayer too, which takes the form of an epic, persistent battle for territory. You pick a side to fight for – Europe, America or Russia, and every day battles take place across 40 different territories to which you contribute.
The care and attention that has been lavished on the game is obvious and the extra seven months development time appears to have been absolutely worth it on Ubisoft’s part. Whether EndWar will redefine how we interact with strategy games remains to be seen, but on this evidence you’ll certainly want to be there to find out.
