 STAR RATINGS EXPLAINED |
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 Tragic
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| Game Details | Released
14 November 2008 | | Format
PS2, Nintendo DS, PSP, PC, Xbox 360, PS3 | | Developer
Ubisoft Shanghai |
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Tom Clancy's Endwar
 Review
While nothing can touch a good RTS for challenging mental dexterity and a genuine sense of achievement, few have the ability to tap into your emotions like a role-player or fighting game and make you feel like someone else. But with unique voice recognition controls that allow you to bark commands like a real military commander, the sense of empowerment when playing EndWar is an oddly thrilling experience.
A strategy game designed specifically for consoles, EndWar’s voice control is by far its biggest draw, adding a sense of immediacy to the gameplay and making you feel like you’re bang in the centre of the theatre of war. Naturally there are limits to using the voice controls, and a certain amount of button pressing is still required for more complex moves, but as the game offers an instinctive set of voice commands and the software rarely misunderstands what you’re saying, playing the game feels natural, engaging and thankfully takes little effort to master.
As a console RTS the game is also perfectly pitched as it offers short, fireworks-heavy bursts of action that will appeal to PS3 and Xbox 360 players with more jittery attention spans than their PC counterparts, and the in-game camera is also more immersive as it takes you right into the heart of battle rather than being restricted to an aerial view. However, once the excitement of the game’s fresh interface and glossy presentation wears off, it soon becomes clear that EndWar is a rather pedestrian RTS, the game’s achievements undermined by simplistic skirmishes where the units’ paper-rock-scissors relationships make for shallow warfare, while the poor storytelling and lack of Tom Clancy pizzazz do little to make you feel like you’re part of a global campaign.
Reviewer: Dave McComb
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