Game Review: Endwar

Billy O'Keefe - Mclatchy -Tribune News Service

"Endwar"

Reviewed for: Xbox 360 and Playstation 3

Also available for: Sony PSP, Nintendo DS

From: Ubisoft

ESRB Rating: Teen (alcohol reference, tobacco reference, blood, language, suggestive themes, violence)

A real-time strategy game just isn't a real-time strategy game without a mouse and keyboard at the ready. But console game developers remain undeterred, plugging away for nearly a decade in hopes of properly emulating what remains a PC-or-bust experience.

If you don't mind potentially annoying your neighbors, family and/or yourself, Ubisoft might have the most intriguing approach yet, even if the game in which it's packaged isn't quite as compelling.

Though you can play "Endwar" with a controller, there really exists no point if you're not on board with the game's gimmick. As strategy games go, "Endwar" rates on the lower end of the sophistication and excitement scale. Never mind that the story actually manages the miraculous task of making World War III boring: In "Endwar," you're more general than mastermind, ordering units around the map but forgoing any sort of in-depth resource management and unit construction, which is the arguable bread and butter of the genre's best.

The reason "Endwar" can justify this simplicity - at least this time around - is because of how little you need that controller if you have a headset and no qualms about talking to a machine. Every action, ally and enemy in the game has a corresponding voice command, and the game's system for managing those commands is so intuitive as to become second nature after a couple missions.

More importantly, "Endwar" understands you. The game's voice recognition technology is stunningly good, and its ability to acclimate itself with your voice after a single, five-minute voice recognition test almost defies logic. Some of your orders inevitably will go misunderstood, but the ratio of hits to misses is so laudably lopsided, it's possible to forget you're dealing with artificial ears and lose yourself in the experience.

Whether the brilliance of the voice mechanic is enough to counter the rest of the game's failings will vary from player to player. "Endwar's" bare-bones unit hierarchy becomes transparent fairly quickly, and were it not for some shoddy troop A.I. and one unfortunate game mechanic that cheaply rewards near-defeated armies with freebie WMDs, the game would be disappointingly easy for disciplined strategists. Multiplayer (four players, online only) naturally makes for a better experience - voice chat remains possible thanks to an on-the-fly toggle - but the simplicity still trickles down, making this less of a clash of strategies than what's available from more fully-formed strategy games.

All that said, "Endwar" remains a respectably entertaining start with a potentially game-changing mechanic that really works. If Ubisoft can slide this technology into a strategy game with PC-level trimmings, the platform gap might finally disappear.

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