Tom Clancy's EndWar

Author: Andy Fair
Published: 23rd November 2008
Comments (8) Stumble
One of the main reasons why RTS games so rarely appear on consoles – and even more rarely succeed – is down to control methods. An RTS requires you to be able to move around a battle scene and issue orders quickly, something which a console controller is not suited for.

Tom Clancy's Endwar gets round this by taking some of the functionality away from the controller and replacing it with speech recognition. It also simplifies the RTS game further by removing some of the traditional RTS elements such as base building and unit deployment.

The speech control works surprisingly well, and is easy to pick up – once you get used to the strangeness of talking to a video game. Each command consists of three main parts: who, what and where. So, for example, you can just say "Unit 1 attack hostile 1" and that particular unit will go off and do its own thing.

If you have trouble remembering all of the commands, a context sensitive menu will pop up as you speak – so say "Unit" and a menu will appear on screen with a list of all available units for you to choose. You can also use the controller if you don't want to speak, but that does defeat the object of the speech recognition a little.

Tom Clancy's EndWar Tom Clancy's Endwar - Gameplay
Click to enlarge

The problem with such a limited control set is that it relies heavily on unit AI to achieve what you want each unit to do. Unfortunately, this is one area where the game falls down. If you've ordered a unit to move to a location, they will do so, but without taking any notice of what they're going past.

Even if they encounter an enemy unit on the way, they'll often walk straight past it without attacking – despite being attacked themselves. If you order a unit to take cover behind a structure, some members of that unit will sometimes take cover on the wrong side, leaving themselves out in the open. It will often take several attempts to get the whole unit hidden properly, something which gets annoying in the heat of battle.

There are several different types of unit available, from riflemen all the way to tanks and gunship helicopters. As you play through the game, units can be upgraded as they survive battles, but here we come to another hiccup. You see, each type of unit in the game will be good at attacking one particular type of unit and be vulnerable to attack from another type. So, for example, helicopters will beat tanks, but be vulnerable to attack from transporters; transporters are vulnerable to attack from tanks; and so on.

Upgrading your units will minimise their vulnerability to attack, and give them new attack methods, but they will always be vulnerable: the basic game mechanic remains the same. That's a bit of a problem, because it takes away some of the incentive to upgrade in the first place – why upgrade when your unit is still vulnerable?

Tom Clancy's EndWar Tom Clancy's Endwar - Gameplay
Click to enlarge

The camera control differs from traditional RTS games in that the viewpoint is from each of your units. Changing the view to another unit is as easy as saying "Unit 1 camera", but seeing the field of conflict from such a low viewpoint restricts your view of other units – there is no bird's eye view so you can see what's going on in the area.

The single player campaign sees you playing from all three sides, so you get to see the storyline progress from each viewpoint, but with each mission lasting around ten to fifteen minutes at most, you lose the sense of scale found in other PC-based RTS titles. Because you have no control over creating new troops, you're dependent on new units arriving as prescribed by your commander and so many missions just become a case of trying to survive until the reinforcements arrive.

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