This is my first review (first post to be more specific) so please take off the gloves and give criticism - the more brutal the better.
Now, Endwar is a strategy game for the Xbox360 system. When I first saw it I thought how the heck do you play an RTS on an Xbox? Well Endwar boasts the use of giving voice commands. You can talk to your units in order to give them orders.
Having used voice recognition software before (Dragon Naturally Speaking especially) I have to say that I have had a poor track record with it. This is where Endwar surprised me immensely, the voice recognition worked a charm. It took all of 5 minutes to set up and despite a little hick up with one of the phrases there were no problems. It is that good that my friend actually trained it and it still worked fine for me afterward. It had a minor issue when we swapped over (we played a level each) in recognising commands, but after three or four phrases it would get used to the new voice.
The reason it works so well is due to the small number of words it has to understand. The voice commands all stick to a predefined pattern of WHO-WHAT-WHERE. Your first words will be to select a unit, you will then tell it what you want it to do (move, attack, retreat etc) and then you will give it a destination or a target. You can also group units together with voice as well and have them all attack a target but the formula is pretty much always the same. Given this small number of words if you mumble or say something slightly different it only has a small set of words it can choose from and will generally try to pick the closest match. We tried to get an infantry squad to get us a pizza from down the road but they didn't seem to understand 'pizza shop'.
As good as the voice recognition is, it is a gimmick and like all gimmicks you will get over it. With a lot of commands you will have to point your 'cursor' at the destination. You are then able to press the A button to perform the most obvious action for that terrain (ie point at the ground it defaults to move, point at an enemy it defaults to attack etc). So it is a lot easier to just point and press A than point and then say "Unit 3, Move To, Target". In the heat of battle it is however easier to use voice because it saves having to find the unit you want and then click on the enemy. However in the heat of the moment you say something too quickly or you mumble too much and you can lose those valuable seconds. It's a trade off but you will find a happy medium between pressing A and clicking. The game does claim that you can play it exclusively from the microphone, but there were some actions we just couldn't figure out - for instance 'Garrison Fire'. This is Endwar's term for shooting whilst hiding in a building. But when we would say Unit 5, Attack, Hostile 3 all the men would run outside and attack, which would have the game tell us that our infantry squad was not in cover.
Graphically the game is quite sub-par compared to other strategy games that let you zoom in this far. The default camera is quite close to the action and given this you would expect some nice visuals to back it up. It is probably on par with Company of Heroes. The only thing that it trumps CoH in visually is infantry. They act quite realistically. Put them in cover and they run up to it and put their backs to it, popping up to shoot over the top. If you tell them to garrison a building, they stack up to the door Rainbow Six style and bust in. It's quite cool to watch. It really falls down when it comes to effects though. Artillery has a nice amount of force when it hits the ground, but when vehicles shoot or get hit by the enemy it feels rather underpowered. The explosion when a tank blows up for instance is week, it seems more like it got hit by an alien ray gun and disappears more than explodes.
Once the gimmick of voice is over the gameplay is where the game is made or broken. There is no building or resource gathering in this game. You buy units and abilities and they come in from off screen (similar to World in Conflict) There are 4 game types in single player, Conquest (capture strategic points and hold them), Assault (kill the enemy), Raid (destroy/defend key buildings from being destroyed) and Siege (capture/defend an uplink. Defender cannot call reinforcements for 10 minutes). Siege in particular can be quite a hectic mode. The defender starts off with a set number of units and can't call reinforcements for 10 minutes. During this time they must hold off an onslaught by the attacker. Once reinforcements arrive it makes the task much easier for the defender.
Reinforcements are the games equivalent of buying units. A set number of reinforcements can be called per game and games have a unit cap which maxes out at 12 (or less depending on the game). Reinforcements are dropped onto the battlefield by transports or in the case of gunships fly in from off screen. This makes the game more fluid than waiting for a unit to be built. However as opposed to World in Conflict which uses a similar system, you cannot change the drop point which means you can't drop units where they are needed quickly, instead you need to wait for them to drive/run to the battle.
Endwar also allows units (or groups thereof rather, because you control squads not individual units) to gain veterancy which plays a somewhat important role in the game. Veteran units can be upgraded and if killed the veterancy is reset. However, when a unit reaches very low health in the game it will be regarded as unable to fight and remains where it 'died'. In order to keep its veterancy you must protect the unit until it gets evacuated by an off screen airlift. If the airlift is successful your unit will be available with all its veterancy in later missions.
As well as units Endwar also offers tactical abilities. These are off screen abilities such as airstrikes which can be used to turn the tide of battle. Airstrikes are one of my personal favourties as they can rain down death on an unsuspecting foe, or one that thinks they have a good defensive position. Nothing better than to have the enemy pounding you with artillery and having it backed up with anti-air and tanks only to have you call in an airstrike and wipe it out. These abilities use up command points of which you have a limmitted number but which recharge at one point every 30 seconds or so.
All in all Endwar's gameplay is somewhat shallow. Things which may be bread and butter for some RTS players, such as tanks being more vulnerable from the side or the back, are absent here. Other than the use of cover by infantry (which is nothing new in itself) the game is a big match of rock, paper, scissors. Tanks kill anti-air, which kills helicopters, which in turn kill tanks. Infantry plays the role of the unit that is mildly good against everything but very vulnerable. There was very little in terms of flanking or tactics like that. It was just a matter of trying to win the rock, paper, scissors match.
One big thing that makes Endwar frustrating is the camera. Your camera can only be attached to your units and can't stray too far away from them. So to get a full view of the battlefield you will constantly be calling Unit 3, Camera - Unit 6, Camera to get a full view of the battlefield (on a side note, the Camera voice command was the one we had a lot of trouble with, we mostly used the controller buttons to snap the camera to units. My friend actually had more success with it than I did, so it might have something to do with my voice). Other than the Sitrep command there is no way to get an overall view of the battlefield and even Sitrep is limmitted. Yes, you units use line of sight to spot enemies, but it would be nice to be able to survey the terrain to see where you can attack from. It also means you can't tell your units to move very far. It is true that the maps have key points marked on them (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie etc) and you can tell your units to go to them by saying Unit 1, Move To, Tango, but it would be good to be able to send your units anywhere with ease. A possible reason the developers did not want to do this is possibly due to the path finding issues. You will constantly see tanks or transports get stuck on each other, or infantry get stuck on a concrete barrier (the soldier will keep running and slowly slide around it).
The game's selling point is the multiplayer which apparently redraws the front lines every day and lets people be a small part in waging a global war. However, I cannot comment on that as my friend (at whose house I have played this game every time) does not have Xbox Live Gold so we cannot play online (and neither do I). Basically the singleplayer mode is meant as a bot-match version of multiplayer from what I have heard.
To wrap things up this game is quite cool to play at first because of the voice controls, but the novelty soon wears off. From a gameplay perspective the game is very similar to World in Conflict and players of that game should probably stick with WiC as it is superior. Without the voice controls this game would not really be worth a mention. I would however recommend it to people new to strategy games as it is not a very deep game.
VERDICT: Rent it first and decide.
Now, Endwar is a strategy game for the Xbox360 system. When I first saw it I thought how the heck do you play an RTS on an Xbox? Well Endwar boasts the use of giving voice commands. You can talk to your units in order to give them orders.
Having used voice recognition software before (Dragon Naturally Speaking especially) I have to say that I have had a poor track record with it. This is where Endwar surprised me immensely, the voice recognition worked a charm. It took all of 5 minutes to set up and despite a little hick up with one of the phrases there were no problems. It is that good that my friend actually trained it and it still worked fine for me afterward. It had a minor issue when we swapped over (we played a level each) in recognising commands, but after three or four phrases it would get used to the new voice.
The reason it works so well is due to the small number of words it has to understand. The voice commands all stick to a predefined pattern of WHO-WHAT-WHERE. Your first words will be to select a unit, you will then tell it what you want it to do (move, attack, retreat etc) and then you will give it a destination or a target. You can also group units together with voice as well and have them all attack a target but the formula is pretty much always the same. Given this small number of words if you mumble or say something slightly different it only has a small set of words it can choose from and will generally try to pick the closest match. We tried to get an infantry squad to get us a pizza from down the road but they didn't seem to understand 'pizza shop'.
As good as the voice recognition is, it is a gimmick and like all gimmicks you will get over it. With a lot of commands you will have to point your 'cursor' at the destination. You are then able to press the A button to perform the most obvious action for that terrain (ie point at the ground it defaults to move, point at an enemy it defaults to attack etc). So it is a lot easier to just point and press A than point and then say "Unit 3, Move To, Target". In the heat of battle it is however easier to use voice because it saves having to find the unit you want and then click on the enemy. However in the heat of the moment you say something too quickly or you mumble too much and you can lose those valuable seconds. It's a trade off but you will find a happy medium between pressing A and clicking. The game does claim that you can play it exclusively from the microphone, but there were some actions we just couldn't figure out - for instance 'Garrison Fire'. This is Endwar's term for shooting whilst hiding in a building. But when we would say Unit 5, Attack, Hostile 3 all the men would run outside and attack, which would have the game tell us that our infantry squad was not in cover.
Graphically the game is quite sub-par compared to other strategy games that let you zoom in this far. The default camera is quite close to the action and given this you would expect some nice visuals to back it up. It is probably on par with Company of Heroes. The only thing that it trumps CoH in visually is infantry. They act quite realistically. Put them in cover and they run up to it and put their backs to it, popping up to shoot over the top. If you tell them to garrison a building, they stack up to the door Rainbow Six style and bust in. It's quite cool to watch. It really falls down when it comes to effects though. Artillery has a nice amount of force when it hits the ground, but when vehicles shoot or get hit by the enemy it feels rather underpowered. The explosion when a tank blows up for instance is week, it seems more like it got hit by an alien ray gun and disappears more than explodes.
Once the gimmick of voice is over the gameplay is where the game is made or broken. There is no building or resource gathering in this game. You buy units and abilities and they come in from off screen (similar to World in Conflict) There are 4 game types in single player, Conquest (capture strategic points and hold them), Assault (kill the enemy), Raid (destroy/defend key buildings from being destroyed) and Siege (capture/defend an uplink. Defender cannot call reinforcements for 10 minutes). Siege in particular can be quite a hectic mode. The defender starts off with a set number of units and can't call reinforcements for 10 minutes. During this time they must hold off an onslaught by the attacker. Once reinforcements arrive it makes the task much easier for the defender.
Reinforcements are the games equivalent of buying units. A set number of reinforcements can be called per game and games have a unit cap which maxes out at 12 (or less depending on the game). Reinforcements are dropped onto the battlefield by transports or in the case of gunships fly in from off screen. This makes the game more fluid than waiting for a unit to be built. However as opposed to World in Conflict which uses a similar system, you cannot change the drop point which means you can't drop units where they are needed quickly, instead you need to wait for them to drive/run to the battle.
Endwar also allows units (or groups thereof rather, because you control squads not individual units) to gain veterancy which plays a somewhat important role in the game. Veteran units can be upgraded and if killed the veterancy is reset. However, when a unit reaches very low health in the game it will be regarded as unable to fight and remains where it 'died'. In order to keep its veterancy you must protect the unit until it gets evacuated by an off screen airlift. If the airlift is successful your unit will be available with all its veterancy in later missions.
As well as units Endwar also offers tactical abilities. These are off screen abilities such as airstrikes which can be used to turn the tide of battle. Airstrikes are one of my personal favourties as they can rain down death on an unsuspecting foe, or one that thinks they have a good defensive position. Nothing better than to have the enemy pounding you with artillery and having it backed up with anti-air and tanks only to have you call in an airstrike and wipe it out. These abilities use up command points of which you have a limmitted number but which recharge at one point every 30 seconds or so.
All in all Endwar's gameplay is somewhat shallow. Things which may be bread and butter for some RTS players, such as tanks being more vulnerable from the side or the back, are absent here. Other than the use of cover by infantry (which is nothing new in itself) the game is a big match of rock, paper, scissors. Tanks kill anti-air, which kills helicopters, which in turn kill tanks. Infantry plays the role of the unit that is mildly good against everything but very vulnerable. There was very little in terms of flanking or tactics like that. It was just a matter of trying to win the rock, paper, scissors match.
One big thing that makes Endwar frustrating is the camera. Your camera can only be attached to your units and can't stray too far away from them. So to get a full view of the battlefield you will constantly be calling Unit 3, Camera - Unit 6, Camera to get a full view of the battlefield (on a side note, the Camera voice command was the one we had a lot of trouble with, we mostly used the controller buttons to snap the camera to units. My friend actually had more success with it than I did, so it might have something to do with my voice). Other than the Sitrep command there is no way to get an overall view of the battlefield and even Sitrep is limmitted. Yes, you units use line of sight to spot enemies, but it would be nice to be able to survey the terrain to see where you can attack from. It also means you can't tell your units to move very far. It is true that the maps have key points marked on them (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie etc) and you can tell your units to go to them by saying Unit 1, Move To, Tango, but it would be good to be able to send your units anywhere with ease. A possible reason the developers did not want to do this is possibly due to the path finding issues. You will constantly see tanks or transports get stuck on each other, or infantry get stuck on a concrete barrier (the soldier will keep running and slowly slide around it).
The game's selling point is the multiplayer which apparently redraws the front lines every day and lets people be a small part in waging a global war. However, I cannot comment on that as my friend (at whose house I have played this game every time) does not have Xbox Live Gold so we cannot play online (and neither do I). Basically the singleplayer mode is meant as a bot-match version of multiplayer from what I have heard.
To wrap things up this game is quite cool to play at first because of the voice controls, but the novelty soon wears off. From a gameplay perspective the game is very similar to World in Conflict and players of that game should probably stick with WiC as it is superior. Without the voice controls this game would not really be worth a mention. I would however recommend it to people new to strategy games as it is not a very deep game.
VERDICT: Rent it first and decide.
