Tom Clancy's EndWar review

I rented Tom Clancy’s EndWar from gamefly without knowing that it used the microphone in order to control the game. This is a bit frustrating as I do not have a microphone that works with my Xbox 360 and I’m not going to buy a microphone for a single game. Luckily, I discovered that if you set the voice control to minimum you can still play the game, though moving your troops around can be a bit frustrating because there is no easy way to sent units to a specific point.  Still, the idea is reasonably well done.

The strategy of this game is in large part a rock paper scissors style with each type of unit being strong against some units and weak against others. Beyond this you have some of the cover systems of games and finds an interesting halfway point between a first person shooter and a real time strategy game. The problem is that the units do not generally work all that well on their own and I found myself switching between units almost constantly to do things like telling them that they should use their basic attack. Beyond this though the strategy is just a bit flat with the levels either being trying to capture specific locations, protect locations or kill everything. There is very little resource management in most cases though there is a bit.

Set in the near future this does not really feel like a future at all. In fact in many ways it feels more like world war II than even modern fighting to me. There is nothing  wrong with this and I generally expected it. In fact the only places where it really felt wrong were when the special weapons came into play because they were nods at advanced technology which played exactly like everything else.

In the end this game really felt very flat. As if the developer though that the voice control aspect of this game would carry much of the game and even if you could use it I do not think that it would really add all that much to the game itself.  If you have a microphone and want to play around with it this gives you some value to rent,  but the truth is that you can skip this game without really missing anything.