A console RTS? Not a popular combination, it must be said. I’ve been very harsh in my assessment of such games in the past, so to have one dropped in my lap came as a bit of a surprise.
There’s no mouse, you see. The mouse is the single most important element of real time strategy. Console fans can argue forever about controllers, and how well they work in shooters, but for RTS there is no contest.
Or there was no contest. Ubisoft have thrown a curveball at one-eyed platform bigots like myself with Tom Clancy’s EndWar; a console RTS using voice commands – one that apparently actually works.
Scary thought, I know. The idea is that rather than fighting the controller, you simply tell your units where to go and what to do. After wondering briefly who they thought they were kidding, I finally slotted the disk into the 360 and fired it up.
There’s a brief voice command calibration ritual to sit through when you start your first game. Word to the wise: Don’t calibrate from the options menu first, because it’ll just make you do it again when you start the game.
The campaign is set against a Clancytopian backdrop of convoluted politics, the end of oil supply, and impending war. Super. If only it were easier to follow. As a keen reader of that kind of fiction, I was looking forward to following a decent story. After the prologue campaign my interest in the story had already been killed off by the uninteresting characters and a seeming bias toward gritty realism rather than interesting storytelling.
But the gameplay – does this newfangled voice control system actually work? For the most part, yes. It’s quick and intuitive, if not hugely flexible, stretegy-wise. It’s surprisingly flexible with regards to pronunciation and inflection. Where it falls down is when there’s background noise. And that’s quite understandable, I suppose. But it’s not just random background noise that can garble your commands. Even the game’s own sound can prevent you from being understood. If the camera is in an area where there’s a lot of action going on, your volume will need to be set quite low if your spoken commands are to be understood. Somewhat lower than the volumes I usually play with, in any case (and for this review I was using a small, low-powered stereo for sound much of the time).
The problem is exacerbated by the consequences of a mis-heard command. With a mouse, a mis-click is usually immediately obvious, and can be quickly corrected. But when bullets are flying and explosions are going off, and you’re waiting desperately for reinforcements, it’s not always immediately obvious that your commands aren’t being followed – especially since each command you give clears the acknowledgement (or lack thereof) of your last one from the screen.
When what was supposed to be a series of target allocations for the units defending a vital uplink turned into an order for half of them to retreat, frustration began to set in. The infantry left guarding the uplink were quickly overrun while the mechanical units took their sweet time getting turned around and back into the battle.
The shortcomings of the command system aren’t crippling by themselves. But when you combine them with some of the daftest unit AI I’ve seen in the last few years, things get pretty bad, pretty quickly. The worst aspect is the pathfinding. Trying to send troop transports to an unclaimed uplink shouldn’t have been an issue. The road led straight there. So instead of going that way, my troop transports took a detour right up to the gate of an enemy-held uplink. One guarded by a unit of tanks. So I ordered the transports back to where they started from. They took so long to figure out how to reverse direction that they were all destroyed, and the infantry inside killed.
Combat strategy itself is based on a basic rock-paper-scissors arrangement, whereby each unit type is vulnerable to another. Simple but effective overall, I suppose. It suits the limitations of the voice command system, but turns most battles into a repetitive juggling act.
The missions themselves can end very abruptly. Your objective may be to defend a given asset for a fixed period of time. If your forces are being overwhelmed and all looks lost, you can end up being saved by the bell, which is convenient, but not very realistic. All too often, a mission will end just when it seems to be getting interesting.
The game thankfully gets deeper as you progress, with some pretty comprehensive unit customisation options appearing; though it does make you work for it.
So is it the answer that console-owning RTS fans have been looking for? No. Well, not yet. The voice command system shows definite potential. It just needs some kind of noise cancelling technology so that the player can be understood over the game’s own sounds, and to have a properly decent RTS attached to it. EndWar is a little limited for my tastes – and, I’d wager, those of most RTS aficionados.
Watch this space, I guess. We may yet see some properly impressive titles making use of this technology.
Regular readers will know that I’m primarily a PC gamer. I don’t play a lot of console titles as a rule, and EndWar has earned the dubious distinction of being the first Xbox 360 game to crash on me mid-game.
Tags: Games