Tom Clancy's EndWar

Staring death in the face

If it sounds restrictive, it's really not. You can do everything like this: organise units, reinforce the number of soldiers on the ground, switch to the tactical "Madden-style" overhead view, call an airstrike, and quickly switch your view from unit-to-unit - everything via this easy-to-grasp system that any idiot, whatever their experience of RTS titles, will pick up in minutes. Aside from the right-trigger, you only really need to use the stick to move around the camera.

And yes, the traditional fixed RTS perspective is replaced in EndWar by 3D battlefields, a leap forward already taken earlier this year by the superb World In Conflict. Epic's Unreal engine has been called upon to render the end of the world. We had access to two maps in the alpha build: New York and La Mancha.

We stormed the Big Apple in multiplayer Conquest mode. Offering a scenario where one side is defending a military base, the other seeking to overwhelm it and control the map, it offered a gentle introduction with manageable unit numbers and tightly-constructed map sitting by the water at the edge of the city. It was heaps of fun, fuelled by the thrilling novelty of the voice commands.

The aim of Conquest is to control the bulk of the map. Once you have secured the requisite number of key zones, a timer begins to countdown - you have to retain the advantage (or extend it, if you're showing off), until this runs all the way down and you claim a glorious victory.

The barren, rocky, arid plains of La Mancha provided a stage for Annihilation against AI. Here, the number of units on the battlefield was increased dramatically, serving up a conflict of far greater scale and destruction.

The cockily self-satisfying experience of commanding the battle right in the middle of it had made us wonder why anyone would want to use the boring, top-down tactical map. But as the complexity of the armed forces increases, the Commander's View offers much-needed strategic clarity. And if you're some kind of twisted 3D-denier, you can play the whole game from here.

Bear in mind that this is war, and you can only see what your units can see. The issue of 'fog of war' raised by EndWar's 3D battles has a neat solution: you can only see what your units can see. The camera can switch between each, and you freely look around, but you can't, crucially, freely move the camera. This proved something of an annoyance at this stage.

A fully-free camera would utterly undermine the strategic nature of the experience, we readily accept. But by not being able to move it around at all beyond a fixed position with each unit, you can't help but feel slightly frustrated and cheated that you can't watch your gunships blast the crap out of the enemy from a better angle. It's doubly frustrating when, as happened a couple of times, the fixed view was partially obscured by a building. For an Unreal-powered wargame, promising vast battles with up to 1,000 units at a time this seems a shame.

Visually at this stage, it's all satisfyingly striking and impressive without knocking your socks off. Explosions look the part, and with large unit numbers the 3D views affords a convincing sense of being at the heart of a violent conflict.

EndPreview

There's a great deal more to see of EndWar beyond out limited playtest, and sadly that was not on offer in this build at least. Inner-city maps favouring troop warfare suggest a different experience, for example, and team-based co-op. And then there's the ambitious "MMO-style" online multiplayer - where persistent units battle it out over what sound like a sports game season mode structure. Not to mention the narrative-driven single-player missions (beefed up by over 40,000 lines of dialogue, as if you weren't talking enough already.)

So it's still much too early to make a judgment. But we can say at this stage with absolute confidence that the implementation of the voice command system is fantastic, and recognition is already high - your correspondent's faded Midlands drawl worked the vast majority of the time, although James the Cameraman's White Van Man Mockney encountered a few problems. We're assured this is being constantly improved upon.

If you've never cared for RTS before, but find Clancy's murky universe of global intrigue compelling, then EndWar's radical interface might just be the thing to tempt you. Whether die-hard strategy nuts find enough to satisfy their demands remains to be seen. But Ubisoft has promised us depth. Let's hope that's another one it keeps.