Genre: Real-Time Strategy

Tag : mass flow controller

Tom Clancy is perhaps one of the best contemporary writers atgiving us a glimpse into the distant future. While not everythinghe predicts is accurate, Clancy's novels and games have an edge ofrealism that makes them distressingly plausible. From the Rainbow Six and Splinter Cell titles to his wide variety of books, he's become the go-to guy forfuturistic looks at warfare. Combining rather interesting politicalinsight with an unparalleled knowledge of upcoming militarytechnology, Clancy's productions are great for those who arecurious about what's to come. His next book-and-game combinationmay offer a rather disturbing idea of what is in our future:Endwar, the war to end all wars. It says something for Clancy andUbisoft that, despite creating a game about an all-too-possibledoomsday scenario, they have still managed to make Tom Clancy's Endwar into one heck of a fun title.
Endwar is set in the not-too-distant future. The United States and theEuropean Union have developed an antinuclear weapon defensemechanism that supposedly eliminates nuclear war as a threat.However, just as this is occurring, it is also discovered that oilreserves have been drastically depleted. In the wake of theresulting war over oil, the political landscape changes. The EUbecomes the European Federation, with certain groups leaving andjoining the federation. The new EF, feeling threatened by thegrowing powers of Russia and the U.S., embarks on a new arms race,this time trying to militarize space itself. In response, the U.S.creates the Freedom Star space station, which is capable ofdropping marines at any point on Earth at a moment's notice. TheFreedom Star's construction is sabotaged by terrorists, and thatfinal act of terror sparks a massive all-out war between America,Russia and the European Federation, the likes of which has neverseen before, combining advanced technology, space militarizationand modern warfare in what is to be the war to end all wars.

Endwar 's biggest selling point, and inarguably its best feature, is thefact that you can use a headset to command your troops. While voicecommands are often quite awkward in video games, Endwar 's voice recognition is absolutely perfect. It takes a bit of timeto get used to speaking the commands aloud, but once you do, itbecomes quite possibly one of the best console real-time strategyinterfaces I've ever encountered. You name a unit, a command, andthe target for the command. This allows you to basically order yourtroops around at the speed of voice, and you can even switch thecamera view or activate special commands using your headset. It'sunbelievably fast and accurate, and I really can't stress howeffective it was to play the game this way.
After a brief tutorial on the voice commands, I was given theheadset and told to go to town  and I did. Within five minutes, Iwas grouping soldiers together, issuing attack commands, activatingspecial features and even dropping weapons of mass destruction likeit was second nature, all while barely touching the controller.There was never a moment where the voice command failed torecognize an order I issued, and the few times I screwed up, it wasbecause I messed up the commands, not because the game failed torecognize them. I hesitate to use the word "revolutionary," but if Endwar 's final product retains this amazingly high quality of voicecommand, it could really force people to take a second look at howthey work out console RTS titles.
The actual gameplay is quite simple, although it looks to have thepotential to be addictively deep. My goal in the demo mission wasto drop my squadron of soldiers into an enemy-held city and captureand hold a majority of the enemy satellite uplinks before the enemywas able to do the same to me. I had a wide variety of availablesquadrons  including tanks, rifleman, engineers and evenhelicopters  that I could summon at will. There were five uplinksI had to take, each designated by a waypoint, and it was a toughbattle moving forward. There were a lot of available tools I had onmy side that allowed me to alter the flow of battle. For one, I hadaccess to a supply of Command Points, which function as the game'scurrency. As long as I had CP, I could summon new soldiers to fightfor me, up to five squadrons at a time. However, I did have limitedCommand Points, which regenerated slowly, and I had a reinforcementlimit, which required me to use my troops carefully or risk losingthe mission when I ran out of soldiers.

As I advanced forward, I got to see a good sign of each unit'sspecialty. Infantry units seemed best at capturing the enemysatellite uplinks, but were fairly slow and vulnerable to mostkinds of attacks. My tanks and transports were capable, whengrouped together with one of the infantry squadrons, of serving asrides for them, giving them greater protection and defense. Thetanks had a hard time against helicopters, though, so I had to becareful not to let my ground forces be overwhelmed by superiorfirepower. Luckily, I also had access to a command vehicle, whichgave me the opportunity to see a sitrep (situation report); itgives you an overhead view of the entire battlefield, making iteasier to issue commands and get a feel of the flow of battle. Thesit screen is fairly simplistic, though, so while you get an ideaof where everyone is, you can't get a very clear flow of how thebattle is going without switching back to your unit cameras.
My troops were not the only weapons available to me. When the tideof battle turned against me, I got to see a few of the moreinteresting special weapons available to soldiers. One was an airstrike from a nearby carrier, which sent down a torrent of flamingdeath upon an unfortunate enemy stronghold, allowing me to move inand capture an uplink. Another useful ability was having mysoldiers hack into and crash an enemy uplink from a distance. Thispermanently disabled that uplink and changed the tide of battle.Now instead of five uplinks to capture, there were four, changingthe required majority and preventing my enemy from earning avictory.
Finally, we come to the big daddy of weapons: WMDs. If things aregoing very, very badly indeed, you're offered the chance to use aWMD against enemy soldiers. This utterly obliterates the enemy, butit comes with a cost. Using it on an enemy will enable their WMDs,thus allowing them to respond in kind. WMDs are powerful tools, butthey must be used sparingly to prevent total catastrophe.

It's important to note that while your ground battles areimportant, they're only one part of a much larger fight, and thisleads to what Ubisoft has nicknamed the MMORTS feature of Endgame . Online gameplay will be built around a massive world war betweenthe three factions, with the entire war developing day to day basedon the actions that gamers take. The front of the war may changedaily, with different soldiers taking different missions that alterthe course of war. Clever groups can even form clans and take onmissions in synchronization to move their chosen faction closer toworld domination. While it wasn't really possible to get a feel forexactly how this would work out in the limited E3 demo, we got afairly good glimpse of the basic outline, with each missioninfluencing who controlled which part of the world. For thoseworried that one faction will gain control and ruin the game foreveryone, don't worry; Ubisoft has promised that they have thingsin mind to prevent any one faction from achieving unstoppabledominance, and the game itself will occasionally reset with a newwar if one group does take over the entire planet.
Tom Clancy's Endwar was shockingly fun. While I'm a big fan of RTS, I had to admitthat voice-controlled RTS sounded like a disaster in the making,but Ubisoft proved me wrong on every account. It's easy to pick upand learn, and it's unbelievably fun to control. The MMORTS systemsounds incredibly interesting, and when combined with the amazingvoice commands, Endwar seems like the sort of game you could lose hours upon hours on andnot even realize it. Barring some sort of catastrophic flaw in thevoice system that wasn't noticeable in my demo, Endwar is going to be one heck of a fun, if potentially depressing, gamewhen it hits stores this October.