EndWar Review: Ubisoft’s EndDebate

by dkpatriarch

© 2008 David Hilton

“Unit five, move to target”.

“Unit seven, attack hostile two”.

“Umm mate, you’ve got a package”.

What?  Startled, I turn my head from the command sit-rep view on my HD TV to the doorway, which I forgot had been left open due to the Spring Australian heat.

A rather amused delivery guy is there staring at me talking intently at the TV through my headphones.  I’m not able to adapt from Colonel ‘me’ to just plain ‘me’ quickly enough and I end up trying to get out of my chair while dropping the controller at the same time, but forgetting that the headphones on my head are attached to the controller.  I look even more foolish as I drag the controller off the chair onto the floor, then when I try to tear the headphones from my head, only end up breaking them.  The delivery guy is now laughing.  Shit.

Tom Clancy’s EndWar from Ubisoft is certainly an amazing accomplishment, but if you are easily embarrassed being caught talking to yourself saying “attack hostile” and “units move to” like me, using the incredible voice command system can be dangerous to your dignity, and even, in my case, my Xbox 360 equipment.  Sure, I know we now live in a world of Xbox Live and Bluetooth, where people look like they are talking to themselves all the time, but I can’t get used to it and still feel like a total tool if someone sees me.

Luckily for me, and anybody like me (anybody?), you can also play the game the conventional way just using the controller, which also works amazingly well.  Yes, that’s right, EndWar is an end to the eternal argument against Real Time Strategy (RTS) games on consoles.  The battle has been won: RTS games can indeed have intuitive controls that work on a console.  Voice and controller commands, or a combination of both, work well in EndWar.

What makes this game so different and much more fun than the other console RTS attempts is the ditching of previous mainstays including the top-down bird’s eye view, the micromanagement of resources, and the fiddly controller combinations to direct your squads, which often lead to frustration.

Take Lord Of The Rings: Battle For Middle Earth for example.  It was a good enough attempt at an RTS game on the 360, but you had to move around the map and click buttons, hold more buttons and stretch a circle with the stick to get groups together, and keep moving them around as fast as you could to win. Then you had to build and upgrade buildings and individual units.  It could get bloody messy.  It was often easier to just build a big army and throw everything at your opponent, while hoping he doesn’t do a better job and beat you to it.  Strategy really had not much to do with it.

EndWar streamlines this by having certain types of objectives like securing up-links which give you command points, defending up-links under siege, and destroying all the enemy’s limited units (which by the way aren’t manufactured at bases but dropped in by air support when enough points are earned and unit choice has been made).

The variety of units is limited but they can be upgraded before a mission at the barracks using money you earn in missions.  You can even personally take control of each battle group and use any upgraded special weapons each unit has.  For example, take control of infantry and you can use sniper.  Gunships have hot shot missiles.

However, you can just use voice commands too by identifying the unit, like saying “unit five” then what you want it to do: “attack hostile six”.  You just need to get used to the command words and that it works in a ‘who-what-where’ fashion.

The combat system has been called a “rock-paper-scissors” system where, for example, tanks beat transports, transports beat helicopters, and helicopters beat tanks.  Artillery is great from a distance but slow, riflemen and engineers are weak in the open but can fortify most nearby buildings and secure up-links, and your command vehicle gives the extremely helpful top down interactive sit-rep map and has drones that can attack and defend.

You also have at your disposal different special weapons, depending on the circumstances, like WMD attacks or air strikes.  These really give the armchair commander the feel of power, and if you are using the voice command system it is hard not to feel like some modern techno-general taking control of the battlefield.

This ability to play as general and play from a distance, simply ordering your units around, or to take control of individual groups and see the war in 3D from their perspective, almost like a 3rd Person Shooter, is another big innovation that makes this game a winner.  You can rotate the camera around the unit and zoom into the distance too.

Hot-swapping between all the different unit’s views or just selecting the different units is extremely easy too, thanks to the picto-boxes along the bottom of the screen which show your different units as pictures in a row.  These boxes display if the unit is moving or fighting, where it is moving to in some cases, it’s health, and each assigned number.  They do not obstruct much of the screen and are easily navigated using the D-pad.

However, you can just use voice commands too by identifying the unit, like saying “unit five” then what you want it to do: “attack hostile six”.  You just need to get used to the command words and that it works in a ‘who-what-where’ fashion.

The story is simply a rehash of the usual fictional future where Russia, the European Union, and the U.S.A. are at each other’s throats over oil.  Yawn. Each mission is introduced by your commanding officer and a map, but this is boring and more cut-scenes would have been nicer.  Mind you, the scene of the Shuttle launch and its subsequent destruction just after take off eerily gave me a flashback of the real 1986 U.S. shuttle accident.

After the initial “Prelude to War” missions, you have a degree of choice over which battles you choose, but while this makes the game less linear, it also reduces any sense of rising tension over the war. It therefore concludes rather abruptly after another battle much like any other, which feels anti-climactic.

You can then go online to see just how good or bad you are, which is obviously the focus of the game, but those without Gold membership can still play Skirmish Mode against an AI enemy. I think they should have included system-link, but as with most games these days, this was ignored.

The diversity of voice work and foreign accents in the game is really good, but your units do tend to give you a constant stream of updates on each of their situations, which can make you scream “Shut up!” because you want to concentrate on what you are saying and what is happening.

Also in the mission briefings some of the monologue from your commanders annoy. You have the typical jingoistic American rah-rahing: “Do America proud!” and the disdainful Russian sneer: “If this is the best oppressed peoples of the world can do, they deserve to die”. However, when you hear your unit leader yell “We need evac now!” in a desperate tone, you do feel like you screwed up and lost some good men.

The sound, when you are on the ground in the battle, is excellent.  Take over your artillery units and listen to them pound away, or take over your infantry and listen to them yell out as bullets whizz by and explosions thunder around them from tanks.  You can hear the mechanical whine of the helicopters as they spiral in flames toward the ground. You feel a part of the action, which is often missing in RTS games.

The maps are small but there is a good variety and from each unit’s battlefield view they are unusually attractive for an RTS.  You don’t just have a generic blurry ground map with some buildings to add more dimension and generic iconic mini-sized men and units running about. You actually zoom into your troops’ view and are among them.

There are forested areas in Croatia, arid areas in La Mancha, massive oil refineries in Rozenburg, and detailed cityscapes in places like Moscow, Paris, Washington, and Copenhagen.  The real-world locations add a degree of realism that many other RTS games who go for fantasy or sci-fi miss out on. It’s hard to care about a place you don’t recognise as your world.

There is even a certain amount of destructibility in the environment, but I would have liked to have seen more.  For example, how can you have a massive pitched battle in an oil refinery without huge eruptions of flame all over the place?  I would also have liked to have a map editor, but I’m probably just being greedy.

If you really wanted to get picky about the graphics, you could say there are the typical cardboard cut-out trees and many buildings are replicas of each other,  but the units look very well rendered and the explosions and fighting are amazing for this type of game.  There is also some clipping when for example tank units try to pass each other and their cannons pass into each other, but all these are minor issues overall.

So this console RTS game is near perfect then, right?  Not entirely.  Besides the graphical glitches mentioned, the control system doesn’t always work properly.  Though it is amazing that the voice command system works so often, sometimes some commands are not understood, delaying your troops’ actions when you have to repeat your instructions.  Not good in the heat of battle when you are losing.

Also, there is still the usual RTS suicidal brigade that decides that to get from point A to point B means going the longest way possible running right into the bulk of the enemy forces so they can get massacred.  There are the usual tanks that cannot seem to work out how to get around or over hills and stay stuck there confused when you’ve instructed them to get going elsewhere. And some units appear so gung-ho that even when near death they refuse to follow instructions to move elsewhere and retreat.

While the 3rd person view and rotating camera makes everything closer and more intense, without your command vehicle’s active strategic view, sometimes knowing where to send units can be difficult.  The right upper corner map shows you which direction your camera is looking, but to see where enemies are you often have to resort to using your units’ camera to find the enemy (behind buildings for example).  When there are a bunch of enemy units together out of sight, finding that damaging artillery squad can be difficult.

The ability to save and replay your battles with a roaming camera is a great addition.  You can see what you did wrong or watch some of the battles you missed because you were too busy directing them.

My inglorious display in front of the delivery guy aside, the innovation that Ubisoft has incorporated into EndWar makes this the best RTS game currently on a console.  Sure, there aren’t that many, but the debate over console RTS games is over: it can be done and done well.  I still think Civilization: Revolution is a more fun strategy game, but it is turn-based, not real-time.  EndWar provides a good depth of experience but makes it relatively simple.

For once I truly feel that if you lose a real-time battle on a console that it will most likely be your own fault, rather than that of the controls, poor AI, or the complexity of the game.  Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted in the  game having said: “There are no bad regiments; there are only bad Colonels”.  EndWar finally allows this to be true.

“8/10

© 2008 David Hilton

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