Tom Clancy's EndWar
Review
Duking it out with the neighbours, PC style
by Sergio Brinkhuis
reviewed on PC
Cover me, I’m going in (cntd)
On the plus side, you do have some influence over which sectors you will be fighting in. By winning battles you can push back the enemy on the campaign map, slowly moving the frontline forward. The opposite is also true, of course. Depending on your difficulty settings and your skill as a commander, sector ownership can become a real dance. A good way to enhance your chances to win is by keeping your units alive so that they gain experience. You can purchase upgrades that are automatically applied to units with a certain level of experience, thus enhancing their ability to survive and deal damage during combat.
Duck!
No amount of upgrades or experience will protect your units when the enemy deploys its super weapon. Only when the battle is decisively shifting towards one side or another, the losing side gets the ability to use its super weapon. Using it is a bit of a fool’s gambit as it will destroy any and all units - friend or foe - within its range. When a super weapon is thrown against you, the feeling of euphoria from smelling the kill changes immediately into a mad dash to save the day. Frustrating as it may sound, it does make battles incredibly dynamic, keeping you on your toes during the entire mission.
I tested the voice commands for a short while, and found them to work fairly well. Yet the novelty wore off and I found I could quicker move my units around by using the mouse. Many PC strategists, independent of the actual control scheme, will likely feel somewhat constricted in their view of the battlefield. You can’t roam free and your only viewpoint is that of your own units. This complicates giving orders somewhat as you can’t always see which of your units is best placed to engage a particular enemy. It doesn’t do too much harm to the game however, and it is perhaps a fair representation of a real battlefield.
Not bad, not bad at all
I am happy to note that EndWar does not feel like a port. The control scheme works well and there are no issues that I would put down to ‘sloppy porting’. The graphics however, could have been a bit sharper. They are certainly good enough to not get in the way of your overall enjoyment of the game, but if you are used to high definition PC graphics, the game does not impress.
Having only played a handful of missions with a pre-release version of the Xbox 360 version of the game, I started the game with very little baggage. The only thing blurring my objectivity was the lukewarm reception that the PC version has been getting since its release. Perhaps my expectations weren’t as high as some people might have had theirs, but I seriously don’t understand the low scores the game is getting around the web. True, the game isn’t as deep or complex as some of its PC competitors. Yet EndWar is a more than decent action oriented RTS that captivates the player with ever changing combat dynamics, great voice work and a novel voice command system. And for those who prefer not to use voice commands the game works just as well - or perhaps even better - using the mouse. Tom Clancy’s EndWar may be “RTS light” but it deserves its place in the spotlight.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
