Tom Clancy's Endwar

The real time strategy genre has always been defined by its reliance on the humble mouse and keyboard as its method of control. Sure, there have been RTS games on consoles - whether you believe Utopia or Herzog Zwei was the first RTS ever released doesn't matter, they were both on consoles. Since Dune 2, however, the mouse and keyboard have been intrinsically linked - joined at the waist like that other classically PC genre, the first person shooter. Can the RTS make the move successfully back to console, like the FPS before it?

Tom Clancy's EndWar is an RTS coming to pretty much every platform out there in early November. Unlike any RTS before it (regardless of platform), EndWar is built around the human voice. Instead of "telling" your units what to do by clicking on them then pressing buttons, you can manipulate the entire game simply by holding a button on your controller and speaking into your headset. Everything from unit selection to camera control is available to the voice control system, with a backup of controller-based input for the timid or those scared of new things.

We had a play on a simple map, where the objective was to take hold of a series of control points. Starting the game, players have a certain number of command points available - points which are used to deploy new units into the battlefield. Unlike classic RTS games, you don't have a real view of the battlefield - you can only see what your units can see, with the camera firmly locked to one of your units at all times.

Switching between units is a simple matter - if you just want to see what they're seeing, a simple "Unit Two - Camera" command will switch the camera to the chosen unit. Units that you have available are straight out of other Tom Clancy games, with units that look awfully like Rainbow Six, for example, deploying when you select to deploy riflemen.

The voice control seemed ok, although we did have trouble getting it to recognise our voice fairly often; the room we were in was hardly quiet, however, with the lead AI programmer giving the other members of the press a rundown on the game (and my progress) as I went. When I pointed out the trouble I was having, he said "must be having trouble with the Kiwi accent!" - hardly what I wanted to hear at that point. That said, the benefit of the doubt still goes to Ubisoft - the circumstances weren't ideal, it wasn't the final build and there's a demo up on Live / PSN so you can check it out for yourself before laying down hard cash. We'll be keeping a close eye on this when the review copy arrives, rest assured. The actual commands themselves were very clear, easy to remember and backed up by a nifty UI element that came up as you issued them. Nice!

The level, and it seems they all break down like this, was fairly straight forward in terms of objective - capture & hold, where the player must hold as many of the five possible control points for as long as possible to win. Holding a control point earns the player points, and if you hold more control points you earn more points - pretty straight forward. The way it breaks down in combat, you'd better be good at talking because you'll be doing a lot of it - don't let the console location fool you, this is an RTS to its core; expect to micro-manage the crap out of your little Rainbows and Hawx if you want to secure victory.

Interesting balancing techniques are thrown into the mix, with extra options being made available should you find yourself on the back foot. The first of these is optional access to WMDs (which vary, depending on your chosen faction) - just keep in mind that, as the losing player, if you elect to fire a WMD you'll give the enemy access to them to fire back. In our case, the enemy needn't have bothered as when I said "WMD enemy unit 6" EndWar decided i'd said something quite different and dropped the bomb on my units instead. Ouch.

Another balancing option is the ability to crash one of the control points, effectively removing it from the map. This is a much more interesting tactical option than it first appears, with cunning tacticians structuring their entire game around when this would come into play.

There were still a few quirks in the build we saw, such as the inability to switch your camera to a unit which is currently being deployed in the battlefield via voice control (the game constantly reporting that it doesn't understand you), whereas you can switch to it just fine via the controller, however these weren't particularly critical and the game was still in development (it's probably finished by now, however). Hopefully these will be ironed out in the release, which will feature perfect voice control - right guys? Guys?

We'll be very thoroughly checking it out very soon now - stay tuned for the review!