Tom Clancy's EndWar (Xbox 360)

Unit 1 attack Hostile 5!
11/12/2008 8:29 PM | 3 Comments | Page 2 of 2

The real problems with EndWar's interface aren't what comes from your mouth, but what hits your eyes. The on-screen display is often a confusing, muddy, unit's-eye view of the action that makes it incredibly hard to make a tactical evaluation of the entire battlefield. I was forced to make constant, disconcerting camera jumps from unit to unit just to figure out what was going on. There is a persistent mini-map to help, but that cluttered collection of too-small moving shapes fails to identify units by type or number, meaning you usually need a unit's-eye evaluation to mount any sort of coherent voice-command action. An overhead "sitrep" view of the field gives slightly more information, but still requires constant controller-fiddling to make crucial enemy IDs. I know war is chaotic and this kind of imperfect information might be more realistic, but the complex mental juggling of what should be plainly shown on-screen saps a lot of the fun from the experience.

When you do get a handle on what's happening out there, the underlying game is too simplistic to be strategically interesting. There are a few battle types, but they all boil down to either rushed battles for strategically important "uplinks," or all-out battles to crush all enemy units. Instead of the unit production and resource management common to other RTS games, EndWar lets the player slowly (and I do mean slowly) fill the field with a set number of reserve units flown in by transport helicopter. The basic conceit is a rock-paper-scissors dynamic between the major units: Tanks defeat transports, which defeat helicopters, which defeat tanks in turn.

Keeping a balanced force of all three of these unit types, with a few long-range artillery and engineers for support, is enough to handle the largely brain-dead artificial intelligence, which constantly sends out lone units to be easily picked off. The supporting AI isn't much better, leaving tanks to lie fallow unless specifically instructed to attack the enemy sitting 10 feet to their right, and leaving infantry to stand in the middle of a field unless specifically told to find cover. When I failed in EndWar, it was usually due to either the on-screen interface problems or to a game-breakingly unfair "feature" that lets the losing side annihilate a large part of the winning force when they're close to death.

Despite all the gameplay issues, though, EndWar is worth checking out for its innovative and largely effective voice controls. If some intrepid developer can take this base and tweak it to work with a stronger core game, we may be saying goodbye to our traditional, handheld controllers for good.

This review is based on a retail copy of the game purchased by Crispy Gamer.