Tom Clancy's EndWar (Xbox 360)

[  « Previous Page | 1 | 2  ]

You don't just pretend you're a commander. You are a commander.

Supplementing the single-player campaign (the game starts with three missions designed to give you a taste of all three factions, then WW3 kicks off and you need to choose sides for global domination) and the skirmish (up to eight-player 20-minute quick in / quick out matches) modes is the Theatre of War mode, which we reckon is the most interesting thing about EndWar. In essence a massive multiplayer persistent campaign, players choose a faction (from the Americans, Europeans and Russians) and fight alongside every other player in that faction and against everyone who isn't. Ubisoft will culminate all of the match results and, the following day, update the Risk-style board. In this way your results will count towards the overall success of your faction.

"Let's say I'm defending Paris," explains Gerighty. "100,000 people play and 70,000 people playing the American faction win. The next day Paris is American and we can all decide to go on the offensive or go back on the defensive again." Nice.

 Advertisement

From our admittedly brief time with the game we didn't notice many differences between the three factions, but Gerighty assures us that there's plenty. "The Russians have huge missile launchers and are more mercenary style, the Europeans are very technologically focused and the Americans are very fast and use stealth. The analogy is orcs, humans and elves." EndWar won't set any graphical benchmarks either, but the game impresses in other ways.

One of our primary concerns going into our voice-on was that the extremely basic and simple gameplay would result in an RTS devoid of, well, RTSness for want of a better word. But Gerighty disagrees. "The idea was to create a strategy game on console," says Gerighty when asked what genre EndWar falls into. "The fact is every time we talk about strategy people internally freak. But yeah, it's a strategy game. We've taken our cues from FPSs, MMOs, RPGs, there are lots of different elements that we've stolen left, right and centre and it makes a very visceral action game. But basically it's based on your strategic decisions and massive battles that ensue."

We can't wait to battle other players online

I agree that the game remains at its core an RTS, and indeed it plays like a traditional RTS, but the emphasis here is on quick fire fun. There's no base-building for example, and micro-management is non-existent bar the occasional "unit X retreat" command when you're getting pummelled or "unit X attack target" when the line of sight system spots an enemy. Ironically, EndWar will probably be harder to wrap your head around if you're well schooled in the PC RTS arts compared with someone completely new to the genre.

The night before Ubidays proper, Ubisoft treated the world's gaming press to a live demo of the game. At the time I was blown away - commanding units through voice command only with the Xbox 360 microphone hooked up while standing in front of a huge screen made EndWar look like the greatest military general sim ever made and the video game most likely to make you feel like Matthew Broderick in classic 80s flick War Games. It seems as if EndWar could be the game to challenge Microsoft's fellow console-only RTS Halo Wars. We're looking forward to WW3 with bated breath.

Tom Clancy's EndWar is due out for Xbox 360 and PS3 in Autumn 2008.

[  « Previous Page | 1 | 2  ]