CONTROL the fate of World War III, with just your voice.
Tom Clancy's EndWar turns the real-time tactical genre on its head and that takes you where others have not gone before - use voice commands alone to take complete charge of gameplay from start to finish.
For years, game developers have been struggling to port two genres of games from the PC to the console - first-person shooters and real-time strategy (RTS) games.
The arrival of Halo, with its twin thumbsticks move-and-look control system, solved the problem for the shooters but repeating the same magic with RTS games has not been as successful. That is because commanding tens of different units running around in the battlefield at the same time is a huge challenge.
On the PC, you simply assigned a number to each unit or group of units. After selecting the unit, you then had to issue it a command like move, attack and build, then swing your mouse to where you want the unit to carry out the command. With only a handful of buttons on the gamepad and the poor imitation of the swift mouse movement, this has proved to be an impossible task.
In EndWar, you use voice commands as an alternative to or to complement the standard gamepad controls to play. To issue a voice command, simply press the right trigger button, speak into the microphone and release the trigger - like a walkie-talkie. There is a fixed vocabulary of about 50 English words which, interestingly, are enough to navigate the entire game.
There are three parts to each voice command. First, you need to select the unit, give it an order, then the destination. For example, saying "unit one secure foxtrot" will get the first unit to move to the area of the map designated as foxtrot.
Grouping units together is also a cinch. "Calling all tanks: create team, red team" will group all tanks into the red team.
Now you can issue commands to the entire group. For example, saying "Red team attack hostile three" will get the whole tank battalion charging at the enemy unit. Every command that can be carried out with the gamepad controls can be mimicked with voice commands, including calling for air strikes, bringing in reinforcements, deploying artillery and getting a report on the current battle situation and more.
This is the first game to be launched out of Ubisoft's new studio in Shanghai. To ensure that the system will be able to detect different accents of the English language, the speech engine was tested against the voices of hundreds of people from 11 nationalities.
The game is set in 2020. The United States is about to complete the construction of its super weapon - the first orbital military platform which will give the United States a new military edge. This is particularly significant as nuclear wars were made obsolete by the Space-Land-Air Missile Shield anti-ballistic missile systems developed by the US and Europe a few years earlier.
The new weapon, therefore, upsets the world's balance of power now held by the US, the new European Federation and an emboldened Russia as the world's leading supplier of natural gas and crude oil. World War III is about to begin.
In EndWar, you command the armies of one of the three factions in real-time tactical warfare. There are seven basic types of units - from riflemen to tanks to gunships.
Every unit has strengths and weaknesses. For instance, the tanks will blast riflemen into smithereens but has no defence against the gunships from the sky, which in turn is vulnerable to plenty of anti-air capability found in units like the engineers, the transports and the command vehicles.
The last is possibly the most important unit as it allows you to call in reconnaissance and get a bird's eye view of the battlefield.
Tom Clancy's EndWar Real-time strategy
$71.90
Launching next month
This article was first published in Digital Life, The Straits Times on Oct 22, 2008.
