Tom Clancy’s EndWar takes the real-time strategy game and strips out the mouse. Ubisoft Shanghai built it for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS, all released in November 2008, with a Windows version following in February 2009. The console and PC game is a real-time tactics title. The handheld versions are turn-based.
The hook is the microphone. Ubisoft claims EndWar is “completely controllable through voice commands,” and any headset that works with your console or computer will do. You speak, your units move. The pitch is control at the speed of thought, and for once the pitch mostly holds.
Trailer, via Ubisoft.
Voice Commands and a Third-Person Camera
EndWar drops the traditional top-down view. Instead it puts you behind a third-person camera in the middle of the fight, which makes terrain and cover matter more than they usually do in the genre. You can zoom in and out and watch hundreds of units collide on battlefields that are fully destructible.
Units gain experience as you use them. The emphasis falls on smaller scale battles rather than one long overarching campaign, and that choice suits the voice control — you are managing a handful of fights, not a spreadsheet.
The platforms split cleanly:
- PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC: real-time tactics
- PlayStation Portable and Nintendo DS: turn-based tactics
A World War III Built on an Oil Crisis
The setting does a lot of work. A nuclear terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia in 2016 kills six million people and cripples Middle Eastern oil, setting off an energy crisis. The next year the United States and the European Union sign the SLAMS Treaty — Space-Land-Air Missile Shield — and co-develop an interlocking anti-ballistic missile system. The two powers test-launch nuclear salvos at each other. SLAMS destroys them completely.
Emboldened by the success of the tests, the US and the EU pronounce “the end of strategic nuclear warfare,” and the world celebrates a new age of peace.
It does not last. With crude at US$800 a barrel, EU member states consolidate into the European Federation, a superstate with a bigger population and GNP than the US. The United Kingdom and Ireland stay out and form the New Commonwealth, neutral but hosting European missile defense uplink sites. Weaker nations in the Balkans and Eastern Europe collapse and get absorbed by Russia, which calls the territory “their land.” Russia, the world’s top supplier of natural gas and crude, rides the energy crisis to an economic boom.
You pick a side: the U.S.-led Joint Strike Force, the European Enforcers Corps, or the Russian Spetsnaz Guards Brigade. You build an army to match your tactical style and fight a persistent online World War III.
What EndWar Gets Right, and What It Doesn’t
The voice control is the whole argument, and it is a real one. Speaking orders instead of clicking them changes how a battle feels, and the third-person camera reinforces it — you are in the fight, not above it. The destructible battlefields give the smaller engagements weight.
The cost is scale. EndWar trades the sweeping campaign for tight battles, and players who came for the genre’s traditional breadth will feel the loss. The story is elaborate, but it is scaffolding for multiplayer, not the point.
Ubisoft cancelled a sequel in February 2010 after EndWar’s commercial failure. That is the honest verdict on the game’s reach, not its quality. EndWar reviewed mixed to positive, and it deserved better than it got. The voice command idea was ahead of its time and remains the most interesting thing Ubisoft Shanghai built here. It is worth playing now precisely because so few games since have tried it.
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