Tom Clancy's EndWar PC

Author: Joe Martin
Published: 8th March 2009
Comments (8) Stumble

Tom Clancy's EndWar

Publisher: Ubisoft
Platform: PC - also on consoles
UK Price (as reviewed): £17.99 (inc. VAT)
US Price (as reviewed): $64.99 (ex. Tax)

This has been a good quarter for strategy gamers. There's been more than just a few decent RTS titles; there's been a glut of them. Dawn of War 2 and Empire: Total War have both just hit and have been dominating the market. Even better, there's the promise of more to come in the following months with Tales of Valor and Soviet Assault.

And stuck in the middle, trying to make some headway in RTS season by virtue of the Tom Clancy label, is EndWar, which has finally, quietly been released for PC.

And, we'll be as blunt as we can here, it just cannot keep up. It just...can't. On the PC, the game is crippled by the very features which were designed to make it work on consoles; voice controls and a tight, zoomed in viewpoint. On the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 these features were needed in order to make the game playable with a gamepad, but on the PC they’re made redundant by the fact that you have a mouse and keyboard, both of which are inherently more responsive and accurate.

In fact, they aren’t just redundant; they’re a liability. EndWar feels broken before you can even get into it. The camera that was meant to be easy for console gamers to use is so restrictive it actually feels like it's trying to strangle the fun from the game and the voice controls are workable, but totally extraneous. The wheel needed reinventing for consoles, not for the PC.

Tom Clancy's EndWar PC Tom Clancy's EndWar PC - Review

Already though, we’re getting ahead of ourselves and are starting to overflow with disappointment. It’s our own fault; we looked at the back of EndWar’s box, saw that it said it had a brand new interface made for PCs and somehow expected more than just the barely functional minimum. We hoped that we might be able to move the camera around the battlefield, at the very least – but we instead found that the view is still tethered tightly to the currently selected unit, preventing you from zooming or moving around too much.

The camera perspective is strangely complemented by the storytelling and unit types too, all of which come together to make a game which feels as disconnected and sterile as possible. The plot, which sees a near-future Russia conspiring against America and a united Europe after the diminishing supply of oil causes a resource war, is poorly told. The exposition is all done via dry mission briefings and snippets of news shows, all of which have truly atrocious voice acting. The generals giving you your orders sound about as interested in the war as a butterfly is in a tidal wave on the other side of the world.

Combine this with a game design that reduces your units to simple figures and that literally makes the game as exciting as saying Unit...Two...Attack...Hostile...One over and over and you’re left with a game that feels so sterile the CD could be safely used as a petri dish, though nothing interesting would ever grow on it.

Tom Clancy's EndWar PC Tom Clancy's EndWar PC - Review

What’s interesting about this sterility though is that it’s so fabulously at odds with the current trends in game design, where RTS games have tried to make the war feel more personal and involved by investing players in individual units. The hugely successful Dawn of War 2 is a great example of this, giving players only a handful of units that have distinct strengths and personalities, as well as letting you upgrade them over time.

EndWar actually combines the worst of both worlds then, giving players only a limited number of very small, capable units, but referring to them only by number and not giving them any distinction. That isn’t your veteran group of combat engineers – that’s just Unit One and, if it dies, then you can have an identical one airlifted in. The key difference is in the language; this is an ‘it’, not a ‘they’.

The game doesn’t even balance the lack of personality and numbers with intricate balancing either. The entire structure of the game is boiled down to a very basic diagram that’s plastered over the loading screens and manual. Basically; all helicopters beat all tanks, all tanks beat all transports, all transports beat all gunships, all infantry get smooshed in the middle.

And yes, that the balancing for all three factions can be boiled down to a single sentence does say an awful lot about how generic and samey the different factions and units are. There’s supposed to be some finely tuned differences in regards to speed and strength for the different countries according to the manual. In our experience though it really doesn’t matter that Russian tanks are stronger than anyone else’s because they still get defeated by helicopters no matter what.