Tom Clancy's EndWar

EndWar gets a lot of things right: a beautifully slick interface, stripped down mechanics, and the best voice-recognition system of any game we've played. It's got plenty to offer armchair strategists, but balancing issues, pathfinding and AI niggles and a disappointing lack of variety in factions stop it just short of its obvious potential.

It's the most accessible strategy game we've played on the 360. The downside of all this user-friendliness though, is that EndWar's not particularly challenging. The single-player game against the computer, while fun and easy to play, doesn't have the strategic depth to keep a man entertained for long.

Ubisoft Shanghai lets us become a full-fledged commander. Thanks to our headset, in EndWar we can give orders to our troops just with our voice. A great gameplay that, unfortunately, is not great technically and it's very online-driven. Good ideas, but not very well used.

Once you get over the fact that playing EndWar makes you look and sound like a bit of a twat, you start to have quite a lot of geek-fuelled fun ordering your army about the battlefield, but we can't help but feel that EndWar is more proof of concept technical showcase than fully fleshed out triple-A title.

Although the real-time strategy isn't for everyone, due to a lack of hands-on controls and tedious pacing, EndWar is well executed and fun.

Strangely it’s not the voice recognition that limits EndWar but the RTS and tactical choices that are overlooked. The single-player is left wanting in favour of a strong multiplayer.

Despite its faults, Tom Clancy's EndWar stands as a welcome departure from the quick and dirty reworkings that so many real-time strategy games have undergone in the transition from mouse and keyboard to control pad.

With enough patience, and perhaps a printable list of vocal commands by your side, EndWar can become an engaging strategy-based game. It may not reach the level of PC gaming’s most popular RTS games, but for console owners, this war is anything but hell.

Developers have struggled to create control methods that would allow console games to host the kind of strategy games the PC enjoys. Here Ubisoft has nailed it. So it's just a shame that the strategy game that was tacked onto it is so light.

EndWar is one of those games that with some more time and commitment could reach the higher level of quality. There are graphic flaws as well as flaws due to the involvement of the player in the story and these only take away from the quality of this game by Ubisoft.

Only a few games have managed to make a console RTS work. EndWar is not one to add to this pile. It is fun in places and the voice command is a nice addition, but in it's current state it just doesn't seem all that enjoyable.

No map allows you to pinpoint a building and tell your men to take cover, so you have to swap from one view to another, suffer losses in the time wasted, and wonder why an army so obsessed with the technology of uplinks is so dire at basic orienteering. [Christmas 2008, p.104]

The only real “achievement” of EndWar is its voice command system.

What is so frustrating about Endwar is that underneath everything, it is a brilliant game. The designers have just made it extremely difficult to get at this by wrapping the core gameplay with a number of ill-conceived modes.

However, as with the single-player game, there’s little personal investment in the persistent world.

The voice command system in EndWar is terrific, and hopefully, future games will take advantage of a similar control scheme. It just isn't enough by itself to raise the game beyond "mediocre RTS." It's definitely worth checking out to see voice command done right, but overall, it lacks the depth and substance to bring anyone over from superior PC alternatives.