Tom Clancy's: EndWar

Endwar is a strategy RTS on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC that takes place in a near future world war 3. The story is set in a world of declining resources, where Russia is the worlds leading superpower, and Europe and America have split their alliance. Russia, now the world largest producer of oil and natural gas, uses its' new found wealth to build a huge army, while America starts a space project called the Freedom Star, a satellite that will ensure American safety. Meanwhile, Europe has built the Shield, a set of energy shield that protects the world from nuclear war. However, when the Freedom Star is blown up on liftoff, and Copenhagen is attacked, America and Europe start a war, before realising that it is Russia that is behind the attacks. With the world now locked in a savage war, you come in.
Endwar is a slightly repetitive game, and only offers a few units. Although it has a solid multiplayer, the campaign has no story apart from the intro, and often you will get bored of doing the same, repetitive tasks with the same units again and again. However, this is spiced up by Endwars' voice command system. This works flawlessly, and is a nice addition to an otherwise average game. The graphics are good, and the frame rate is always maintained at a good speed. The level of detail is stunning, and you can zoom all the way down and see the battle from the soldiers views. You can even see their faces and individual equipment. Also, the multiplayer has a unique feature called the Theater Of War. This is an ongoing WW3, where you pick your side, customize your army and fight on ever changing frontlines. The results of the battles faught during the day are added up at the end of the day, and then the war continues, with countries gaining or loosing territories. Over all a well balanced game, but one that lacks a motive and variety. Not a game to set your heart on, but a nice addition if you've got money to spare.
OVERALL: 7/10

After an near interminable wait, I was pleasantly surprised when End War eventually turned up. After initially trying to play the game with only the handset I was beginning wish I hadn't bothered. However when I was reminded that there was a headset still unused in my X-Box...box things became much easier and fun! I'm just not very good at it!

The control system is really good once you get the hand of it; voice recognition is pretty good and as a previous reviewer said once you get the hang of some of the maps, gameplay flows.

Although I'm sure there are better strategy games out there End War is a ood addition for the uninitiated. A very enjoyable blast even if I do feel a bit of a tool taking to the tv screen!

First off, this game is severely short on the default difficulty level. There's an achievement for completing WWIII in less than 15 turns, and I got it without even trying. Well, I suppose I was actively avoiding missions that seemed unduly difficult. Regardless, the bulk of the game's enjoyment lies in the multiplayer mode, be it skirmishes vs the AI, or against another person. There are a few game modes, from capture all uplinks (read: bases), seige (where you have to defend one uplink), one where you only have to capture the majority of the uplinks to win, and one where you have to destroy every enemy unit on the battlefield. All of these types feature in the campaign mode, and it's given some added depth by allowing you to customise and upgrade your units between battles using credits earned in said battles (once you get into WWIII anyway).

Unfortunately since it's so short, you won't be able to buy every upgrade available so you'll have to pick and choose which unit types get which upgrade... Or maybe you WILL be able to get all the upgrades, if you go out of your way to complete every single battle. I should probably mention that I didn't really pay attention to the story (which is passably interesting), as the essential gameplay usually boiled down to the same thing. This is not to say it's repetitive (as each encounter can be and usually is different) just that you already know what to expect and what to do with all the unit types you're handed within the first 15-20mins. You'll spend the first 5-10mins getting used to the control system which i'll get to in a bit.

Being a strategy game designed for consoles, the unit types are fairly rigidly structured in a rock-paper-scissors format: Riflemen beat Air, Air beats Tanks, Tanks beat Riflemen. Engineers are only dangerous when in cover, and Transports are only really dangerous against Air. Command Vehicles give you things like a UAV and a Sitrep (overhead map from which you can also play the game) and Artillery just bombs everybody to pieces. Come to think of it, I'd say Riflemen and Air were fairly evenly matched depending on things like upgrades, if the men are in cover, who shoots first, etc.

This works well for the most part but can be annoyingly unfair on occassion: One Gunship Squad will almost (if not entirely) annihilate TWO Tank Squads (that's 4 helicopters versus 8 tanks, in case you were wondering) in open combat. If they are evenly matched, the "weaker" unit in the match up will always lose. This basically means that you need to escort your units (or roll around with overwhelming force), unless you're just doing housekeeping like moving from one owned structure to another. It may not seem like a big deal, but you have limited resources so you really cannot afford a huge amount of losses.

When one side is about to win, the other gets a gamebreaker of sorts. Since I always play on normal or easy difficulty, I rarely get to use these; instead the AI can, will, and does use them with annoying regularity. It's completely predictable in that regard. I haven't tried the multiplayer yet (because I have a silver membership), but I suspect that people will either spam this, or otherwise abuse it. Speaking of multiplayer, I'm not sure there's one box co-op but I think it supports co-op over xbox live.

Again being a strategy game designed for consoles, the control system is near perfect. Since the gameplay itself is relatively simple (you guys, go there, do something), the control system is perfect for it. If you don't know by now, it's almost entirely voice activated. It's not the first game to have it, but I dare say it's the first game to really sell the concept of talking to your men. It's smooth and 99% error free, even without calibrating it in the voice trainer. I'm not sure if it's reading the tone of my voice or the actual words (maybe a bit of both?), but it detects natural language pretty well so I don't have to speak in a stilted manner such as "Unit. 2. Move. To. Bravo.", I just say unit 2, move to bravo. The 1% error comes from when you speak too fast and the game can't tell what you said, or when you mumble. The speech does need to be clear. The... Mission Lady (as i like to call her :p) will also tell you when your units are in trouble, so you can order a hasty retreat without ever knowing what the problem was. Just say "Unit 4 retreat", and you've done all you can. And right after that, you can say "Unit 5 move to Unit 4", to give them some support. You really need to see it in action to appreciate how fluid all of this is. You can play the game completely with your voice

The game's graphics are okay to pretty good... I think it's the animations that really sell it. When your units are moving you can go to a camera view so you can see what they're seeing, and this is pretty good for infantry as it takes you right into their faces. When they're taking an uplink too you see them stacking up on the door, breaching and then a little video pops up showing them hacking in. It's a nice touch.

All in all it's a fun -if fairly simplistic- game. I got it for a fiver used I think, and it was worth every penny. Replayability is middling to high, as I can play the campaign again and see what other battles there are to do, etc. There are a fair few maps to play with in skirmish as well, and along with the gametypes, it provides a robust enough multiplayer mode. As i said, the bulk of the game's fun will be found by playing against other people, but the AI will do in a pinch.