Real-time strategy (RTS) games on consoles have had a troubled history. Most have fallen flat on their face but recent times have brought some admirable attempts from EA in the form of Lord of the Rings: Conquest and Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars. And now we have the high profile Tom Clancy’s EndWar from Ubisoft and next year Halo Wars from Microsoft. The genre on consoles is booming but most still complain of the control style on consoles versus the vastly superior PC mouse and keyboard. Ubisoft Shanghai has set out to change all that with an innovative voice control system.

There isn’t much story to this game. Basically you have a tutorial campaign that lasts an hour or so setting up the reasons for the three factions to fight each other. The three factions are The United States (Joint Strike Force), The European Federation (Enforcer Corps), and Russia (Spetsnaz Guard Brigade). Basically the year is 2020, some years before a nuclear attack on Saudi Arabia kills millions of people and destroys the world’s oil supply.  Russia emerges as a global power once again holding most of the oil reserves and starts to build up their military. At the start of the game in the Prelude to War campaign (which serves at the tutorial) all three factions are getting attacked by unknown terrorist forces but soon over the next hour or so, you’ll find out the truth and watch triggers everyone to go to war with each other. Basically though, the reason is pretty stupid and generic but nonetheless gives you reason to fight. In the World War 3 campaign it’s essentially the online system. You get little news snippets but nothing that constitutes a story. Interestingly, almost like when you were a kid playing Risk, you start to form your own reasons in your head why you are attacking one place over another and gives your imagination a fun workout but leaves you wishing for something more. Especially considering Tom Clancy titles have always given you story and this one leaves you hanging.

The gameplay is easily summed up as rock-paper-scissors. Just substitute them tank, gunship, and transport. Amongst the other units are riflemen, engineers, artillery, and command vehicle. They always say that the men on the ground is what wins wars and this is true here, your infantry troops are vital. They are the only ones who can capture and upgrade uplinks located throughout the maps. Capturing them gives you extra command points which to spend to bring new units onto the battlefield and upgrading them allows you to call in air strikes, electronic warfare, or force recon, which drops regular army troops for you to command. These support options are only available if you meet certain criteria, for example, if your faction controls an air field nearby.  The infantry also can occupy buildings and take cover which gives them significantly better defense. The artillery is just as it appears, allows you to shell the enemy from afar but is weak to just about everything up close. Finally, the command vehicle allows you to have a traditional RTS view of the battlefield. To command your troops you can either use the controller, which is slow and cumbersome or use the voice control system. This system works extremely well but is not perfect and will get confused sometimes. Basically the setup is who, what, and where and feels completely natural once you get a hang of it all. Unfortunately without the command vehicle the game is just a series of corridors since the control are such location based. You do have some limited ability to place them elsewhere but your camera will be locked onto individual units and can be tedious if you tried to move them without the command view. You can set a rally point but by you still have to navigate to that point to set it unless you’re in command view which by that point isn’t really needed. After each battle you accrue a different type of command points which you can spend in the barracks to upgrade your units. Your units that fought well will also rank up but remember to protect them because they can be permanently killed. In battle a unit will be incapacitated and get rescued but if the opponent decides to be a jerk, they can permanently kill them off. Not only do ranked units have better stats, certain abilities in the barracks require your units to be a certain rank. Another annoying feature is on some maps when the person is losing, they enter DEFCON 1. This phase allows them to crash an uplink, which really helps even out the game, but in addition to that they get a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) which will incapacitate any unit in its blast, and destroy any units that were incapacitated. While really cool to watch, it sucks to watch your units go down so quickly. To even it out, the winner will also be able to unleash a WMD if the losing side decides to do it. Basically though, these two features just allow sore losers to get the last word because if the person even has the slightest chance of winning, they won’t focus on killing off your units nor risk your retaliation with a WMD. Crashing an uplink is sufficient to rebalance the game. Allowing people to kill your units and use WMDs just pisses you off, since typically they won’t affect the current game much but just screw you over later. There are four game types in the game; conquest, assault, siege, and raid. In conquest you fight out to control the most of the uplinks. Assault is straight deathmatch until the enemy is all gone. Siege the attacker has to capture and hold a critical uplink until the timer runs out and Raid the attacker has to kill half of the critical targets. Overall though, the game is based around the uplinks and they are critical in every game no matter what. After each game, you will have the option to save a replay of what you just did but unless you’re in a clan, this feature won’t get much use because the game is boring to just watch due to its slow speed. Overall this sounds great, a little simplistic but great. Unfortunately, despite what the manual and game say, there are negligible differences between the different sides. One side may be a hair faster, another might be a hair stronger but at the end of the day its meaningless due to the rock-paper-scissors gameplay and this is what ultimately kills the longevity of the game and makes if feel immensely superficial. Diehard RTS fans will want more, a lot more but for people who have never played an RTS before will enjoy the simplistic nature of it.

Tom Clancy’s EndWar is basically like the Unreal Tournament of RTS games. Basically what you played in the World War 3 campaign is what you play online. You pick your side out of the three factions and start fighting over the territories of the world in an online theater of war. After a certain amount of time, the round ends and the map is reshaped by who won which territories. It works out very much like Risk. All the same game types and barracks are here, nothing is different other than playing with up to 3 other real people. Therefore sometimes you’ll have two people on a side and contrary to typical XBL play, people are extremely communicative. Before entering the map, you sit there for a minute or two and strategize verbally and during the game you rely on each other to survive and win, it’s a very pleasant surprise. There seems to be a slight skew towards being defensive since you can easily knock out an uplink once you’re “losing” but other than that it appears to be well balanced but you can’t give too much credit to the designers since all the sides are essentially the same.

World War III is very brown and grey. The world looks drab and depressed. Which is probably what that war would look like but the style is overplayed. The units look great and sometimes get little additions with certain upgrades from the barracks. You can also switch between three different types of camouflages which allow you to slightly differentiate your units from your cooperative partner. The units vary from side to side giving you at least the illusion that they are different. With these little personal touches, it would’ve been nice to see a small touch to the units to signify their rank but there is not. As vehicles roam along the land, they will knock over fences and trees which is neat to see but infantry will readily clip through uplink walls and such which is disappointing because the animation is pretty good.

The sounds are okay but there is nothing that great. The units generally lack the oomph and deafening loudness that you would associate with war. Before each battle a commander will give you a general synopsis of the territory and/or the commander you’re fighting. Unfortunately this becomes repetitive quite quickly even though they are decently done. The voice control system lets you know when things aren’t understood and you’ll get a verbal prompt if your units are in a bad fight but nothing noteworthy. There is barely any music or anything since the game is mostly online. Overall nothing special and almost diminishes from the experience.

Some of my gaming roots are on the PC where I thoroughly enjoyed the Command & Conquer series for many years. This game may remind some of my old RTS veterans of Ground Control and the lesser known Force 21 but they are similar in look alone. This game lacks the depth and variability that those games have. The sides are nearly identical. The game favors the “losers” and gives people, who will probably not win, a chance to screw the winner over for games to come. But this game does get some things right. The voice control, I believe, is a breakthrough for the RTS genre on consoles. It is not perfect but it works well and feels incredibly natural. The simplistic and easy to understand rock-paper-scissors combat will be very accessible to entry-level RTS gamers and allow them to have fun in no time. The graphics are pretty good but are nothing special and have some clipping issues with units. The sound is okay but generally lacks the oomph you would associate with war and the voiceovers become repetitive quick. Overall, a decent online RTS game that will appeal to the casuals but will generally be shunned by the hardcore.

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