Tom Clancy's EndWar

Author: Andy Fair
Published: 23rd November 2008
Comments (8) Stumble

Multiplayer

It's not all bad news, though – there is a little glimmer of hope in Endwar's online offerings.

You can play quick skirmish battles against other players, but the best way to play online is in the Theatre of War. When battles are played online in the Theatre, they take part in a MMO-like persistent world where lines of engagement change by the day.

You'll still be playing the same basic mission types as the online game – variations of CTF, deathmatch and so on – but at the end of each day, the results of every battle are combined and battlelines redrawn to reflect each faction's wins and losses.

As a result of this map jiggery-pokery, you'll be playing a different set of maps each day that you play, depending on which faction you play for. The downside of this, of course, is that you'll be playing on the same small subset of maps for the whole day, until the battle lines are redrawn.

Tom Clancy's EndWar Tom Clancy's Endwar - Multiplayer & Conclusions
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Still, this doesn't get away from any of the downsides of the single player campaign – you're still battling with dodgy AI, awkward camera angles, etc – and the sense that you're supposed to be playing as part of a larger whole never really comes through. Even though battles can be 2v2, there's no real sense of coordination, and at the end of the day you're just one random person fighting against another random person.

Conclusion

Tom Clancy's Endwar has all the hallmarks of an excellent title: it's a console RTS, which makes it a rarity; it has an innovative control method which works surprisingly well; and it has a storyline that is both interesting and pertinent to today's events. So it's a shame when all of the pieces are there but they just don't fit together very well. The voice control works excellently, but it works so well because it has a limited range of understanding, and this in turn limits other parts of the game.

The game itself feels slightly dumbed down – there is no real strategy involved, and the levels are quite short. Many of the missions just require you to either hunker down and wait reinforcements or rush forward and attack the enemy, and with such a short mission length, there's no time to build up any level of suspense or immersion.

Tom Clancy's EndWar Tom Clancy's Endwar - Multiplayer & Conclusions
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Tom Clancy's EndWar Tom Clancy's Endwar - Multiplayer & ConclusionsTom Clancy's Endwar does show that it's possible to do RTS on a console, it's just that Ubisoft has achieved it by stripping out many of the things that make RTSes what they are. That's a bit like taking an F1 car and making it street legal by replacing the engine with one from a Mini Metro. Sure, it's still theoretically an F1 car, but it's not very exciting to drive.

And that's the real problem with Tom Clancy's Endwar: in making an RTS accessible to console gamers by using speech recognition, Ubisoft has ended up creating a game that has many of the features of an RTS, just without much of the fun and excitement.

That's not to say that Ubisoft has failed completely – it hasn't, and Tom Clancy's Endwar is still a fun game when judged on its own merits – it's just that the developer has fallen short of making the definitive console RTS.

It's a good start, though, and we look forward to seeing where Ubisoft Shanghai can go from here.

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