Tom Clancy's EndWar

It's enough to make you suspect that, even without voice control, EndWar might still be onto something. Its tight vocabulary deftly manages to capture every action you'd conceivably want to carry out, and the manner in which it forces you to communicate through real sentences rather than a mish-mash of triple button taps and expandable paintbrush cursors cuts out the classic newbie problem of knowing what you want your men to do, but not quite being sure how to coax them into doing it. A good example is the old "selecting all of a certain type of unit" problem, a simple enough task that has some console RTS games quietly freaking out. Rather than tabbing your way through various highlighting options, all you have to do in EndWar to get the job done is say, "Calling all tanks." It's snappy, it's fairly transparent, and it makes you feel like a nineteen-thirties radio dispatcher, too, which can only be a positive direction for videogames.

Of course, it helps that, from what we've seen so far, the rest of the game has been intelligently refitted to work on consoles too. Ultimately, perhaps the defining feature of EndWar is not the voice control so much as the new perspective, which sees you pulled in closer to the action, looking across the landscape rather than directly down at a large chunk of the play area. Not only does this create a much greater sense of involvement with events on the battlefield, and gives you a chance to enjoy the slick animations and not-so-slick clipping issues, but by limiting your options to anything within the line of sight of any given unit, it means you aren't getting brain-spammed by too much information flooding in all at once. Switching between units either by using the control pad or by saying, "Unit X, camera!" will allow you to shuffle around the constituent parts of your army in seconds, while a tray at the bottom of the screen constantly keeps you informed on the health of all your units as well as what they're currently up to.

There's been some judicious pruning as well. Some will be disappointed by the removal of base building, and the use of control points as the sole resource, but it puts the focus firmly back onto combat tactics, as well as ensuring that missions get going a lot more quickly. Equally, a resource cap limits the amount of units you can place on the map during the course of the game, meaning that tank rushes, with their lengthy build period, are a thing of the past too. If you're the kind of player who likes refining build queues and seeing a vast army of your own making surge across the screen towards the enemy, you'll doubtless be disappointed, but others may appreciate the more direct strategies available and the shorter, snappier play that ensues.

Beyond the individual battles, in multiplayer as in single-player there's the overarching war, unfolding over a series of turns. Details on how the wider conflict's going are accessed via the Situation Room, a map of the entire world that pops up between skirmishes, giving you options on where to fight next (there will typically be three or four different battles available at any one time as the frontline evolves, and matchmaking will find players from around the world to fill out the other factions in each encounter), or a chance to visit the barracks and upgrade units. On this meta-level, EndWar behaves like a game of Risk, and with an ongoing multiplayer campaign taking potentially a few weeks to burn itself out before resetting, there's something pleasantly MMO-like about the whole approach.

Tom Clancy's brutally simplistic take on geopolitics means that, while he may be the kind of person you wouldn't want to get stuck in a lift with, his world is perfectly suited to the rock, paper, scissors dynamic of an RTS, and from what we've seen EndWar has much to be getting excited about, particularly if you've always liked the idea of tactical games, but have struggled with them on consoles. While the voice control element may garner the most attention, it's far from a flashy gimmick, and there are promising signs that a fairly deep game lies ready to be explored beneath it. Ubisoft, then, might be about to give us the most accessible RTS yet made, on console or otherwise, and if that's the case, contrary to its name, EndWar might be about to start one.