We gamers are a fickle bunch, we are mildly pleased one minute and utterly disappointed the next.
Back at the end of August at PAX I saw the demo of EndWar by Ubisoft's marketing reps and a member from the dev team from the Far East. At that time I was impressed with the not only the voice communication, but the clever hud and unit management system built into the game.
Unfortunately since that time there has been no improvement upon the game's overall structure. In a lot of ways EndWar is just as disappointing as Battlefield 2 in it's limitations. For example, like BF2, EndWar only supports the "deathmatch" & "seige" modes throughout the Theater of War and multiplayer matches. But this game's has so much more potential; it's fully capable of capture, search and destroy, demolition missions, etc.
The whole of the game puts you in the shoes of a field commander, tasked with facing multiple other field commanders from the EU or Russia. Though the game won't let you devise too much of a strategy, as you only get to pick one of two potential battles even if you win or lose. And those battlefields are selected for you. To encapsulate the game as a whole: it feels as if you're constantly being proded to pick the lesser of two evils. Real strategists wil be dissapointed as there is no option to be wildly creative or relentlessly methodical.
Furthermore, units under your command have no special identity other than call signs. The closest thing you can do to specialize your units is to upgrade them; which is handled in something of an unique but absurd fashion. Rather than upgrading individual units, once you buy an upgrade it applies to units of a particular rank. So certain units won't be available for an upgrade unless you wrought them in the fire of war. Of course these blanket upgrades impede you from having more flexibility from a certain type of unit. Let's say that you want one tank unit to be fast and flexible, and you want another tank unit to be more powerful and defensive. In EndWar this is impossible.
For some reason it feels as if the game was built with such a structured sense of rock, paper, scissors, that it never truly ever evlovled from that form of simplicity. In a some respects EndWar feels more like a demo of voice recognition capability than a retail video game. Granted the controls and mechanics are great, but in the end this game won't take long to master, it won't require much strategy, and may not have the difficulty to hold many gamers interest.
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