Tom Clancy’s End War Trailer and Beta Impressions
Courtesy of gametrailers.com, we have a brand new Tom Clancy’s End War trailer for you.
While the premise is certainly an intriguing one, End War may not be the intuitive and captivating experience that it purports to be. We were lucky enough to have been excepted into the Tom Clancy’s End War Beta (now closed) and we were less than impressed overall.
First and foremost, this is still an RTS game. Despite being developed from the ground up for consoles, End War features the kind of gameplay one would expect from the same ol’ RTS formula. The Beta in particular features maps where you and an opponent must capture control points. The person with the most control points will earn percentages regarding battle statistics in their favour, while their opponent will conversely have less of a percentage at the end of a session.
Multiple ground and air units with distinct attributes are at your command, and if employed effectively can fulfill their roles quite well. Thankfully, you appear to have unlimited resources from which to draw from, with the caveat that you can only have so many units on screen at once, and you can only actively develop new units based on a rechargeable resource meter - a clever and welcome addition.
Regardless, there is still a steep learning curve involved here. This is frustrated by a camera that appears to want to only stick to units and units alone, without a free camera function. This is frustrating as your common urge is to want to fly about the map at will. This restriction is likely a concession to more typical RTS games and their fog of war dynamic that obscures much of the map unless you have a unit in that area.
The same can be said of the voice commands. Actually, the voice commands are very impressive. They respond almost flawlessly and the short tutorial on how to issue commands lays out the command trees succinctly. But they don’t mitigate the learning curve by very much, which is, I think, the whole point of having voice commands in the first place. There’s a lot going on here even without resource management, and so you’ve got a lot of finagling with many factors before anything will click.
It must also be mentioned that the above trailer is flat-out false advertising. The two players featured blurt out tension-filled commands off the cuff, with vague directions such as “Take out those tanks!” This is in no way how the game actually uses voice commands. Instead, there are very specific things that can be said only and in a branching manner. For instance, and we don’t have this correct verbatim, in order to attack a unit you would utter “Unit B, attack, Unit C”, or something along those lines. More complex commands are issued in a similar fashion with more steps in between. There’s none of this “We’ve drawn them in, launch the fighters” BS from the trailer.
Another less than stellar aspect of the Beta were the visuals. The promise in early trailers is all but absent at this point, which we’re willing to give the benefit to the doubt to given its early state. Even so, one of the major selling points was an RTS with eye-level appeal and intimacy, and that is not apparent in the Beta at all.
Right now, End War is running on a lot of promise, but from what we’ve seen that promise has yet to be realized. Voice commands aside, End War has a long, hard road ahead if it wants to accomplish the goals it set out for itself in the first place.
peachey @ July 11, 2008