Tom Clancy's EndWar (DS)

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Jamming and Blocking are fun strategies to execute

Bar this, it's as you were, soldier. EndWar, as you'd expect, features multiple units of destruction across land, sea and air types. Knowledge of what works best against what, in classic RTS rock, paper, scissors fashion, will serve you well. As your units defeat other units they will gain experience and their stats will improve, giving the game an interesting dynamic where you need to focus on taking down strong enemy units before they rank up to a level where they're almost invincible. The maps are a little tight, and without base building you won't find yourself commanding massive armies, but overall the experience is a solid one, with blocking and jamming both fun and satisfying.

Funatics' good work with the gameplay is somewhat undone by the disappointingly rough presentation, redundant stylus controls and lack of online play. While the cartooney graphics work well when viewing the game from a top down perspective, the combat animations, where the fighting units square up on the top screen, are, frankly, awful. The battle animations in Advance Wars are great, and, perhaps because of that, EndWar's are distinctly underwhelming. The poor graphics and bland presentation combine to give EndWar an overall lack of oomph that Advance Wars has in spades. EndWar might be about a plausible near-future global conflict involving three hulking superpowers, but we would have liked a bit more excitement.

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Using the stylus is pretty much pointless. Selecting units and fields on the map is quite fiddly, and quite a lot of work on the wrist, so you'll soon gravitate towards using the d-pad and face buttons which, once you get familiar with what's what, is a quicker and more intuitive control system. While this is somewhat disappointing, it's a similar case with Advance Wars, so we can't criticise EndWar too much for not making the most of the DS' unique stylus controls.

The gameplay is let down by battle animations and a general lack of excitement

The lack of online play is made more prominent because Advance Wars has it, but there is a wireless two-player mode that requires each person to have a copy of the game. To be honest, it'll take you ages to work through the three meaty campaigns anyway, one for the Europeans, Americans and Russians (a structure that mimics EndWar's more illustrious 'next-gen' cousins). And, when you're done with that, you can always create and share maps wirelessly using the solid map editor (sharing user-generated content between DS' via the internet would have been too good to be true).

Still, we can't help but come to the conclusion that while EndWar provides DS owners with an alternative turn-based strategy experience, it does not provide them with a better one. That's not to say it's not worth picking up. It's just that Advance Wars is still our preferred fodder when the handheld strategy cravings start to bite.

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