Tom Clancy’s Endwar Impessions

Over the past couple of days I’ve had a chance to participate in the VIP demo for Tom Clancy’s Endwar, and as promised, here are my impressions so far.

For those that don’t know here’s a (very) brief rundown of the plot. The game is set in 2020, and Europe, Russia, and the USA are all at war. In the face of crisis all of Europe has merged to become the European Federation, a new superpower, apart from the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Switzerland. The US plans to launch a new weapon, the “Freedom Star” into space, much to the dismay of the EF and Russia, which in turns leads them to withdraw from NATO. However, just before the Freedom Star is launched into space, the site is attacked by a terrorist group, which marks the beginning of all sorts of trouble.

The first thing I decided to do was fire up the solo campaign mode to get to grips with the game. The first thing you’re confronted with is microphone calibration. Now I’m sure when the in-game voice command was announced, we all though the same thing – if they don’t get it spot on, it’s going to fail miserably. Well you can worry no more; I can confirm that the voice command works almost flawlessly. You’ll be bellowing out orders to your troops in no time. It works by giving you lists of words that you can combine to form sentences. For example, you’ll say things like unit 1 > move to > foxtrot, or unit 2 > attack > hostiles. The game understands my voice correctly about 90% of the time, which is a relief.

The solo campaign mission featured in the demo was nothing more than a short mission to allow us to understand how the game works before playing online against others. It seemed pretty simple, I yell out orders to my units to attack the enemy, and they do it. I was pretty confident that I knew what I was doing, so I decided to head over to the skirmish mode for some real combat. The idea in skirmish mode seems to be that there are check points located all over the map, and you capture them in order to be able to call for more units and gain an advantage. In the demo I could play as Europe, and the US, but not Russia. Of course, naturally for my first game I chose to be Europe. The skirmish map itself was the JFK Space Center, a decent sized map mostly covered by trees and a few buildings. The first thing that struck me went I entered the game was the camera. You can’t just free roam the map as you can in other RTS games, you can only see as far as the line of vision from your selected unit goes. This works fairly well, as you have work to discover the enemy’s exact location. It still feels a little unnatural though. You order troops into the various check points in order to capture them, much in the way you’d expect. Troops can also garrison nearby buildings ala Red Alert 2. After you capture a check point, you’re able to call in more units, and in the demo I was able to call in more riflemen, engineers, artillery, tanks, transport, and helicopters. On the map there were a few check points, so I managed to get a nice variety of units all at once.

Aside from being able to tell your units to move and attack, you have a few other commands at your disposal. You can form your units into larger groups, which are useful in the heat of the battle, and saves telling units individually to move around. Similarly, you can use commands such as “calling all riflemen” to select all of those units on the battlefield. Another useful command is the ability to tell you units to retreat, which is great for pulling units out of a battle that they’re losing quickly. A couple of times while using the retreat command, my units would begin to retreat, but not move far enough away and as a result end up taking more fire, but this seemed to be only a minor problem.

A couple of common RTS conventions have been done away with, and in battle there is no longer one building that serves as a base for your army. The check points replace there need for a base, and units are dropped in as reinforcements, instead of being built like in most RTS games. The camera view also challenges our idea of what a RTS game should be, doing away with the birds-eye view in favour of the more horizontal line of vision, which could be argued draws us closer into the battle.

If the wait untill November 4th (or November 7th for Europe) untill the release of Tom Clancy’s Endwar is too much, fear not, the demo will become available for everyone to play at some point before the game’s release.