- Deeply customizable armies featuring unit ranks and hundreds of upgrades add up to endless replay value.
- Can be played almost entirely via the revolutionary voice command system.
- Experience a chillingly realistic vision of World War III in the fashion of the best techno-thrillers.
- Explore 40 stunningly realistic real-world battlefields set in Europe and the United States, including Washington D.C., Paris, and Moscow.
- Go to war online in a persistent multiplayer campaign allowing hundreds of player matchups in battles that can last for months at a time.
Nobody thought humanity could possibly let it really come to this, but in 2016, the unthinkable happens… The first nuclear exchange occurred over Middle Eastern soil. It lasted only 5 hours and resulted in the launch of the world’s first joint missile defense system to ensure peace, that is, until now. With the United States, the European Federation and Russia at odds a final war is inevitable. Although intercontinental ballistic missiles have been rendered obsolete, command technology has
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Review by Joshua D. Hawkins for Tom Clancy’s EndWar
Rating:
EndWar is an excellent game. I’ve never been into RTS games. I’ve always thought they were kind of boring. But this one has me hooked. I played for about 4 hours last night, and I enjoyed every minute.
First off, although I have never gotten into RTS games before, I have seen them played, and I found that EndWars graphics are as good, if not better, than any RTS I have seen. If you are coming into it expecting it to look like Dead Space or GoW2 or anything like that, you’ll be sorely disappointed. That isn’t the focus of this game. Regardless, the game is incredibly fun to play.
Secondly, the voice command works great. In the amount that I played last night, I only had one or two problems with it. When I first got R6V and R6V2, I tried the voice command feature, and found that I would have to repeat an order four or five times to get them to do something, and even then the order was usually misunderstood. All I can say is that EndWar has come a long way in terms of voice command, and I find it unlikely that you’ll have any of those problems.
The gameplay is fun. I enjoyed the fact that the campaign didn’t just throw you into the middle of WWIII. It begins with the “Prelude to War” campaign. During this time, you don’t have all the abilities that you have during the WWIII campaign, and it is a great way to get aquatinted to the voice-command system. During this time, you will not be able to select your unit types prior to the mission, which is great because it helps you learn what units work most effectively against others. Also, you will not be able to upgrade your units at this time either. It also allows you to play all of the different modes as well.
After the “Prelude to War” campaign (which, by the way, is around 10+ missions), you get to the WWIII campaign. During this time, all of the limits that were imposed on you in the previous campaign are lifted, and you have full control of the gameplay. I especially like that your units gain experience and are promoted as long as they live. The higher the rank and the more experience they have, the better they play and the more valuable they are. When these units are killed, they are replaced with fresh recruits that have a lower rank and no experience. This puts a tremendous amount of value on the units that you have, and you find that you do whatever you can to see to it that they survive from mission to mission. They aren’t expendable, and that has an amazing impact on gameplay. You’re not just going to send your units on a suicide mission.
I haven’t jumped into the “Theatre of War” campaign yet, which is the online multiplayer campaign. Should be excellent though.
Anyway, incredible and fun game. Can’t wait to see more like it.
Review by Wenjie Yin for Tom Clancy’s EndWar
Rating:
RTS-like games on consoles always have a cumbersome control system when compared to their PC versions, although game-makers are trying everything to simplify the complicated controls into a single controller with about ten buttons to make up for the loss of keyboard and mouse (which might be the biggest invention in the PC input equipment). However, this ends when EndWar comes out.
Features:
No annoying resource-harvesting, only fast-paced actions. That’s the Endwar, with the innovative voice command control system. Sit on a couch, trigger RT, speak out your command based on a “Who-What-Where” structure and game is in your hands (voice). RTS games have never been so smoothy on a console. Despite the fast actions it presents, it doesn’t mean there’s no strategy. You still need to plan well to win every battle.
Voice Control:
Voice control works actually pretty well so far as I have experienced since more than 90% of the time my command is taken into action correctly using the original Xbox 360 headset. Also, button-based control is available, which means you can treat this game like a traditional console RTS game if you like, but it’s hard to defeat a human opponent while you are not using voice control, because you need longer time to give your orders.
About the game itself:
The background of the game is set in the near future when the WWIII is set on fire.
In the Solo Campaign mode, You will first get yourself familiar with the game by walking into the Prelude part telling you how the WWIII breaks out. You will be assigned as a commander of one of the three factions, which are Euro, USA, and Russia and play a series of easy battles. That’s telling you the basic rules of this game. After these tutorial-like battles, the WWIII begins and you have to choose your faction to continue your fight. You earn money after each battle for upgrades for your units.
Theater of War is one of its multiplay modes and is much like the WWIII solo campaign but with human opponents not AI players. Other multiplayer modes include quick match in which you fight a random players, and private match where you can play with your friends.
Win the battles:
Endwar includes several types of maps. In some you need to defend the enemy’s siege, while in others you try to secure the uplink buildings to gain more advantage to crush the enemy. Several types of units are available, including riflemen, engineers (using rocket launchers), tanks, transporters, gunships, artilleries and some others. The basic rule is like a triangle that gunships are effective at beating tanks, which are the killer of transporters, which are in turn gunship-hunters. In solo WWIII or Theater of War, the units survived will be promoted and become much more powerful. If they are defeated but evacuated (retreat), they can still be dispatched in the next battle and their ranks are maintained. However, they will disappear from your dispatch list when they are defeated and killed. So, use your high-ranked units wisely and don’t let them attack without proper covers. Unit promotion will not be saved for quick match or private match.
Closing Comments:
Endwar is really an RTS game made for console. It’s the start of a new type of RTS on console system that is promising, although we do see some drawbacks such as frame loss when many units are firing at each other on screen at the same time, and no big difference between the three factions except for the looking. I haven’t touched any RTS game on any console for like 3 years, and thanks to Endwar that brings me back.
Review by Jakub Kurzak for Tom Clancy’s EndWar
Rating:
I am a big fan of Clancy’s series. I own all Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon titles for Xbox, both the original and the 360. Obviously, my main focus in games is tactical shooters. I have never been too big of a fan of strategy games. I did always enjoy the tactical aspect of Clancy’s shooters, though. Those of you who played GRAW 2 certainly remember missions where you had support of tanks, armored vehicles, helicopters and even air-strikes. EndWar basically takes that concept and magnifies it to the size of a battalion. And it works magnificently.
EndWar puts the missing “R” in the RTS genre. You don’t build silly contraptions, you don’t harvest mysterious resources. There’s you, the enemy and the battlefield. You have infantry, armor, artillery, attack helicopters and other units at your disposal. The battlefields are real cities with landmarks you can recognize. Everything is destructible. Buildings collapse under artillery barrage. Trees burn when hit with incendiaries, etc. There are 39 maps! And you can play each in four different modes, in each one facing different objectives, what creates pretty much endless list of combinations.
I came across some criticism about the game being a simple rock-paper-scissors scheme: tanks beat transports, transports beat gunships, gunships beat tanks, etc. To me, the people who say this, simply don’t get it. The beauty of the game is that basic rules are simple, and then combination of terrain, objectives and the style of your play and your enemy make every battle unique. Not to mention that the units have pretty impressive number of upgrades, which actually make it possible to violate the rock-paper-scissors scenario, e.g., beat transports with gunships.
The voice command system is nice and most gamers love it. I have a kid, though, and I only play when he is asleep, so voice commands are out of the question. Surprisingly, the game is very playable with the controller only. I don’t feel that I am at a disadvantage. Another cool feature is action replay. It is a great feature and yet few games have it (Actually, the only other one I can think of is Halo 3) Combined with the great artwork of landscapes and units, makes for a great feature.
EndWar is a must-have in your Clancy’s collection. Single player is tons of fun and online play is the most addictive ever.
TheKOOBAS
Review by Todd A. Jacobs for Tom Clancy’s EndWar
Rating:
Endwar is a game that could have been great, but was released in an unpolished state to meet holiday marketing deadlines. It’s a shame, because this title had the opportunity to revamp the entire RTS genre, but fell short of the mark. That isn’t to say it isn’t a great game, but it *does* have major flaws.
The Good Stuff:
– This is NOT a first-person shooter. You issue orders to your units, and let them do the work! The only major exception to this is using secondary abilities such as laying mines or firing flamethrowers, but the principle holds.
– The voice command system works great most of the time. Just use a loud drill-sergeant voice to ensure good voice recognition.
– Resource gathering (the bane of most RTS games) is limited to capturing uplinks and managing your “command points” (accrued through time on the field and capturing uplinks) wisely.
– Much of the time, you can give your units basic commands and let them figure out the rest, although they occasionally need help with pathfinding or optimal target selection in a firefight.
– A relatively simple combat chain with very little luck involved. For example, a hardened gunship will always beat a hardened tank–provided it isn’t being simultaneously attacked by a couple of other units at the time.
– The ability to buy upgrades and earn promotions for your units, which gives them additional abilities.
The Bad Stuff:
– Not a game you can play when people are trying to sleep. They’ll think the house is being invaded by a platoon of drill sergeants bellowing at the TV.
– Some commands can only be given using voice, and some only via the controller.
– The single-player game is a little thin on story, and acts mostly as a trainer for the online multiplayer mode.
– The online multiplayer mode is HUGELY glitchy and unpolished.
– Game mechanics are largely undocumented. The combat chain is explained in the manual, but bonuses, upgrades, and a whole host of battlefield mechanics are completely undocumented by the game maker, and only anecdotally understood by the community. In other words, if you have an engineer unit that gets a +10% damage bonus, ten percent more of what? No one knows.
Online Multiplayer Bugs:
– The lobby system is terrible. People can often wait upwards of 30 minutes to find a match.You can’t see who is waiting on what maps, how many people are playing, or what teams need a few more people.
– The “primary frontline” rule is complex, poorly implemented, and even more poorly understood by most players. This means that you can’t simply win or lose territories; there’s some alchemy involved that means that you can lose territories you won the day before, and can’t attack critical territories that are right next to you on the map unless the stars are in alignment or some such nonsense.
– The “Deep Strike bug” can sometimes leave rifleman dangling from a gunship until they die, unable to move, offload, or evacuate.
– “Unit killing” is a feature of the game that allows you to finish off enemy (or even friendly) units after they’ve been defeated, effectively replacing the killed units with recruits. This has the effect of removing special abilities from that unit in future battles. This is important to prevent super-soldiers on the battlefield, but it’s terribly unbalanced in that it can take days or weeks of game play to rank up a unit, but only seconds to kill it off. Unit killing is entirely too easy in Endwar, and a frequent topic of complaints by starting or mid-level players who haven’t learned to compensate.
– Unbalanced maps that favor one faction over another, and can lead to excessive unit killing by the side with the upper hand. This increases the amount of time people spend waiting in the lobby to play “fair” maps, or to teams camping out out on maps that favor them hoping to abuse players who wander in without knowing any better.
– Servers that lag out frequently, leaving teams with AI commanders that eat up limited unit reserves, do amazingly stupid things on the battlefield, and (due to another set of bugs) ensure that players who play with or against AI commanders often get units perma-killed without also earning promotions or credits for the match.
– Random unit losses. Occasionally, you will enter the barracks to find that your elite infantry (or other valuable units) have died and been replaced by raw recruits, even though they haven’t been in any battles recently.
– Poor matchmaking. Matches don’t take player abilities or battalion ranks into account, often throwing new commanders up against Rank 12 uber-commanders with all the upgrades. This can be very disheartening to casual players.
– The ease of unit killing and unbalanced nature of airstrikes and map topography make ranking up your battalion a very slow grind, which can be very off-putting for new players.
– Unit killing in the game is the biggest source of overall poor sportsmanship, trash talking, and revenge play in the Theater of War. Some players focus on unit killing instead of winning battles, reducing the fun for many.
– Finger-pointing from technical support. Ubisoft will tell you that they aren’t responsible for the multiplayer problems, and that the problems need to be reported to Xbox Live support because Microsoft manages the servers. Microsoft will then tell you that there is no problem because the servers are up, and that you need to call Ubisoft because they made the game. It’s maddening.
Despite all its problems, this is still one of the most addictive games I’ve played in the past few years. I’ve honestly dedicated weeks to the game, and find the combination of RISK-like strategy and small-unit tactics incredibly addictive. There is a real thrill in overwhelming the enemy on the battlefield, and in watching close combat through the eyes of your various units. And, on the rare occasions where one is actually able to rank up a unit, there’s a genuine pleasure in watching the unit power through the opposition until it’s invariably destroyed by a vengeful opponent.
I would NOT recommend this game to casual players, even though that was the target audience. However, war gamers, strategy gamers, and RTS gamers should all find something to like about it.
Review by Linda L. Keezer for Tom Clancy’s EndWar
Rating:
I’m a big fan of RTS games, ranging from Age of empires, to Star trek armada and empire at war. When Ubisoft began working on Endwar I was excited that the universe of Ghost recon finally went RTS! Many of the Ghost recon series characters are recurring in this game, as battlefield colonels, or Captain Scott mitchell who is now General Mitchell, and briefs you on updates every day and before every battle if you choose to play as the JSF.
To start, you get to start the Prelude to war part in which you play as all three factions for a few missions, then after that, you pick which faction you ultimately want to play as (i picked the JSF first).
the voice command was a big bonus. It recognizes my commands 9 out of 10 times, and the times it doesn’t are usually my fault for not giving the proper command. Also, it is a definite plus to be able to order “unit one move to bravo” while you are engaged in combat as you might not have the time to look at the map and manually order them to move there with your controller.
As for non-units, you get to use WMD’s, (only when you go to defcon one and are in danger of losing the mission) airstrikes, and other things, such as using an uplink station as a reinforcement point to get your units to the battle quickly.
Now, I have a PS3 and a 360, and was quite conflicted with which one to get it on. I ultimately decided for the 360 because I had a headphone that had come with the 360 when I bought it, the 360 supported 1080p, the PS3 version required 5 gigabytes of info to save on my PS3 (i only have a 60 gig version so that was too much) and there was no difference on multiplayer.
However, it will be a great game on either console, and I highly recommend it as a great addition for Tom clancy fans, or for those just looking for a fun RTS with revolutionary voice control. It will be keeping me busy for days to come as the campaigns last a while.