Tom Clancys EndWar
Nobody thought humanity could possibly let it really come to this, but in 2016, the unthinkable happens… The first nuclear exchange occurred over Middle Eastern soil. It lasted only 5 hours and resulted in the launch of the world’s first joint missile defense system to ensure peace, that is, until now. With the United States, the European Federation and Russia at odds a final war is inevitable. Although intercontinental ballistic missiles have been rendered obsolete, command technology has evolved. Battles will be fought from war rooms, by the sound of human voice. Leaders will rise and countries will fall. Experience World War III in your living room with Tom Clancy’s EndWar, a revolutionary new war game built to maximize next-generation gaming consoles and completely controllable by voice.
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The horrific nuclear conflict in the Middle East not only killed millions, it also crippled the world’s fuel supply. With oil from that part of the world no longer available, crude oil prices skyrocket to $800 a barrel. The vast Russian landmass now holds the largest accessible reserves of fossil fuels, making Russia the world’s primary supplier of energy virtually overnight. With the massive economic boom it receives, Russia quickly re-establishes itself as a superpower and restores her military might. In response most of Western Europe unifies to create the European Federation, a new nation destined to be a formidable 21st-century superpower. But things are also changing across the pond. In 2020, the United States is on the verge of finishing construction on the Freedom Star, a controversial orbital military platform that will upset the balance of world power. The European Federation withdraws from NATO in protest. Tensions between the European Federation, the United States, and Russia are building and will soon reach the breaking point. The EndWar is about to begin. Which side will you fight on?
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The European Enforcer Corp
The European Federation is a new superpower, founded in 2018 to consolidate political and economic power in the face of the world energy crisis and accelerating security and environmental concerns around the globe. Though publicized as an evolution of the European Union, demanding admission criteria disenfranchised all but the wealthiest nations of Europe. The UK and Ireland declined membership (instead joining the New Commonwealth), as did Switzerland (fiercely neutral as always).Consummate professionals, the European Federation Enforcer Corps is made up of veteran elite counter-terrorist and peacekeeping forces from throughout Europe. Calm and precise, these highly-trained and experienced soldiers are especially skilled in urban warfare. They excel in electronic warfare as well as advanced directed energy weapons technology, and have the fastest battlefield vehicles. The Enforcer Corps also have access to the world’s best “less than lethal” weaponry.
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The United States Joint Strike Force
Once strong allies with Europe, the U.S. has broken ranks following the dissolution of NATO and the formation of the European Federation. The two superpowers are now locked in a costly and controversial military space race. This rivalry builds to a crescendo when the U.S. prepares to launch the Freedom Star, a huge military space station that Europe suspects could be used to neutralize its missile shield satellites. An evolution of today’s Marine Expeditionary Units, the Joint Strike Force is known for their integration of air and ground combat capabilities. Epitomizing the saying, ‘high speed, low drag,’ these elite soldiers excel in precision firepower and can rapidly deploy anywhere in the world. Moreover, their stealth technology and the accuracy of their weapons are second-to-none.
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The Russian Spetsnaz Guard Brigades
The world’s number one supplier of oil and natural gas since the 2016 nuclear war in the Middle East, Russia has experienced an economic boom of epic proportions. It has used its newfound riches to build up its military to levels beyond the Cold War and is once again a true superpower in the world arena. Soldier for soldier, no force on the planet can match the Spetsnaz Guard Brigades in terms of raw, brute force. Hardened veterans of Russia’s many regional conflicts, these troopers are a highly effective, determined, and deadly force. The Spetsnaz tend to focus on heavy weapons and heavy armor, and often ingeniously modify standard-issue equipment to suit their needs, resulting in vehicles bristling with bolted-on weaponry the original designer never dreamed of including.
- Wage war without ever picking up a controller with the revolutionary voice command system.
- Experience a chillingly realistic vision of World War III in the fashion of the best techno-thrillers.
- Explore 40 stunningly realistic real-world battlefields set in Europe and the United States, including Washington D.C., Paris, and Moscow.
- Deeply customizable armies featuring unit ranks and hundreds of upgrades add up to endless replay value.
- Go to war online in a persistent multiplayer campaign with fully-customizable battalions and units.
- Watch the destruction unfold in spectacular detail in massive battles featuring hundreds of units and fully destructible environments.
Join in a Battle Armed for the Future
Instead of the traditional top-down view, EndWar uses a unique third-person camera that puts you in the heart of the battle. This means that you get a bird’s-eye view of the devastation that unfold as hundreds of units engage the enemy on fully destructible battlefields. Also, true to the Tom Clancy legacy, EndWar deals with fictional, but strikingly true to life situations and scenarios and features a wide range of vehicles, weapons, and equipment based on real-world military research. The result is a frighteningly realistic and relevant war-game experience that provides players with unprecedented access to the cutting-edge technology of tomorrow’s wars and the combatants that may faceoff in them.
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars Endwar: review
This game is fun at the core. What hooked me into the game was the fact that you could control all or most of the commands via voice. The pro’s is the voice commands, highly customizable units, good balancing without the pain of having to micromanage every unit for effective fire and the characters just look cool (personally). The Cons are a short story mode, playing story mode on medium difficulty, I finished in a day. The voice command can be miss read, like saying “ah” can be misread as Artillary and sometimes repeating a command more than once. Overall innovative with the voice command, lack of Micromanaging is a plus, but the story and voice command may hinder the fun.
4 Stars good game
So I bought this game about a month in a half ago and so far it’s a good one. It takes a little bit to get your bearings and the voice control takes some to get use to. However, once you figure it out, “UNLEASH HELL!”.I have not played it online yet because of technical problems but the game does have decient play-back value. I like being able to save battles then watch them played back. I thought that was pretty cool. Pretty cool strategy game. Looking forward to “World Conflict”.
4 Stars Love being in control? Perfect!
This is a great Game for any Warheads out there…not literally but I like how i feel like this General of an entire army and I find myself barking orders at times during rough battles and too bad they dont respond to “not so nice” comments.
4 Stars An innovative and addictive (but very buggy) strategy/action game
Endwar is a game that could have been great, but was released in an unpolished state to meet holiday marketing deadlines. It’s a shame, because this title had the opportunity to revamp the entire RTS genre, but fell short of the mark. That isn’t to say it isn’t a great game, but it *does* have major flaws.
The Good Stuff:
– This is NOT a first-person shooter. You issue orders to your units, and let them do the work! The only major exception to this is using secondary abilities such as laying mines or firing flamethrowers, but the principle holds.
– The voice command system works great most of the time. Just use a loud drill-sergeant voice to ensure good voice recognition.
– Resource gathering (the bane of most RTS games) is limited to capturing uplinks and managing your “command points” (accrued through time on the field and capturing uplinks) wisely.
– Much of the time, you can give your units basic commands and let them figure out the rest, although they occasionally need help with pathfinding or optimal target selection in a firefight.
– A relatively simple combat chain with very little luck involved. For example, a hardened gunship will always beat a hardened tank–provided it isn’t being simultaneously attacked by a couple of other units at the time. 
– The ability to buy upgrades and earn promotions for your units, which gives them additional abilities.
The Bad Stuff:
– Not a game you can play when people are trying to sleep. They’ll think the house is being invaded by a platoon of drill sergeants bellowing at the TV.
– Some commands can only be given using voice, and some only via the controller.
– The single-player game is a little thin on story, and acts mostly as a trainer for the online multiplayer mode.
– The online multiplayer mode is HUGELY glitchy and unpolished.
– Game mechanics are largely undocumented. The combat chain is explained in the manual, but bonuses, upgrades, and a whole host of battlefield mechanics are completely undocumented by the game maker, and only anecdotally understood by the community. In other words, if you have an engineer unit that gets a +10% damage bonus, ten percent more of what? No one knows.
Online Multiplayer Bugs:
– The lobby system is terrible. People can often wait upwards of 30 minutes to find a match.You can’t see who is waiting on what maps, how many people are playing, or what teams need a few more people.
– The “primary frontline” rule is complex, poorly implemented, and even more poorly understood by most players. This means that you can’t simply win or lose territories; there’s some alchemy involved that means that you can lose territories you won the day before, and can’t attack critical territories that are right next to you on the map unless the stars are in alignment or some such nonsense.
– The “Deep Strike bug” can sometimes leave rifleman dangling from a gunship until they die, unable to move, offload, or evacuate.
– “Unit killing” is a feature of the game that allows you to finish off enemy (or even friendly) units after they’ve been defeated, effectively replacing the killed units with recruits. This has the effect of removing special abilities from that unit in future battles. This is important to prevent super-soldiers on the battlefield, but it’s terribly unbalanced in that it can take days or weeks of game play to rank up a unit, but only seconds to kill it off. Unit killing is entirely too easy in Endwar, and a frequent topic of complaints by starting or mid-level players who haven’t learned to compensate.
– Unbalanced maps that favor one faction over another, and can lead to excessive unit killing by the side with the upper hand. This increases the amount of time people spend waiting in the lobby to play “fair” maps, or to teams camping out out on maps that favor them hoping to abuse players who wander in without knowing any better.
– Servers that lag out frequently, leaving teams with AI commanders that eat up limited unit reserves, do amazingly stupid things on the battlefield, and (due to another set of bugs) ensure that players who play with or against AI commanders often get units perma-killed without also earning promotions or credits for the match.
– Random unit losses. Occasionally, you will enter the barracks to find that your elite infantry (or other valuable units) have died and been replaced by raw recruits, even though they haven’t been in any battles recently.
– Poor matchmaking. Matches don’t take player abilities or battalion ranks into account, often throwing new commanders up against Rank 12 uber-commanders with all the upgrades. This can be very disheartening to casual players.
– The ease of unit killing and unbalanced nature of airstrikes and map topography make ranking up your battalion a very slow grind, which can be very off-putting for new players.
– Unit killing in the game is the biggest source of overall poor sportsmanship, trash talking, and revenge play in the Theater of War. Some players focus on unit killing instead of winning battles, reducing the fun for many.
– Finger-pointing from technical support. Ubisoft will tell you that they aren’t responsible for the multiplayer problems, and that the problems need to be reported to Xbox Live support because Microsoft manages the servers. Microsoft will then tell you that there is no problem because the servers are up, and that you need to call Ubisoft because they made the game. It’s maddening.
Despite all its problems, this is still one of the most addictive games I’ve played in the past few years. I’ve honestly dedicated weeks to the game, and find the combination of RISK-like strategy and small-unit tactics incredibly addictive. There is a real thrill in overwhelming the enemy on the battlefield, and in watching close combat through the eyes of your various units. And, on the rare occasions where one is actually able to rank up a unit, there’s a genuine pleasure in watching the unit power through the opposition until it’s invariably destroyed by a vengeful opponent.
I would NOT recommend this game to casual players, even though that was the target audience. However, war gamers, strategy gamers, and RTS gamers should all find something to like about it.
3 Stars RTS=boring, First Person Shooter=fun
I got this game free from Dell with my XBox 360. I figure it would be a good game never played an RTS game. I feel that it is a good game for RTS, but being a First person shooter kind of person it was the most boring game I could have played. I stopped after about an hour.
If you like battling, shooting, and destroying in first person…please walk away. If you like Risk and Clue go with this game because you will likely love it.
