The Tom Clancy series is popular for it's field of strategy, tactical, and stealth titles. There's been swat teams, secret agents, recon teams, and more. Now Ubisoft is trying something new and bringing in a game centered around using your voice more than your hands. And as we all know; voice recognition software isn't the most reliable technology. But does Endwar change that? Let's find out.

The story for the most part seems just like a widget they pushed into the game to tie everything together. And it does do that, but if you're looking for a huge narrative touching story about war and soldiers; this is definitely not it.

Over the next 25 years the world's supply of natural fuel, oil, and gasoline run dry and the only real country with a ton of it left to get is Russia. World War 3 begins between America, Europe, and Russia to gain control of the world's remaining oil. There are several subplots but because of the way the game's story is presented, you won't likely follow it or even care. Endwar was never about the story.

For the most part Endwar skipped out on impressing us with incredible visuals, again for the sake of focusing on gameplay. Environments look decent but there are a ton of objects that are just cookie-cutter bad, with straight lines and horrible polygon angles. Heck, even the trees are usually just squares up close. Everything tends to meld together well from a distance and there's no real repeating textures to be seen, but it just generally looks passable.

Vehicles and soldiers are actually decent looking and move the way they should. The people look pretty decent even up close (for a strategy game), and animate fluidly with little hiccups. However from time to time you see the tank units moving but their treads are completely frozen.

Again everything is passable and not ugly by any means, but my main issue with the visuals is the actual gunfire and explosions. When a unit is firing at another unit it looks like they're just taking random blind pot shots. You can't tell me their aim is that bad. Well in reality it's not; the units will still take damage even if the actual bullets and missiles you see don't actually hit the targets. It's weird. Mind you this doesn't happen all of the time but you do constantly get a sense that it's always happening, you're just not seeing it because of the angle you're watching the action from. Seeing a tank blow up when the missiles hit beside it is a strange sight.

There were a few clipping issues with certain objects in certain places on certain maps, but it's again nothing overly concerning.

The best part of the visuals is simply seeing your units move the way you want them to, navigating the terrain, and of course what we all love; explosions. The minor explosions are great, but seeing the nuke go off in the distance is just a treat. Even if it was aimed at you, not by you.

Again things get passable here. Nothing stands out as overly spectacular. The sound effects from guns and explosions are what you'd expect, and hearing the nuke go off or the crashing of an uplink (explained later) is well done. If you can down close to your units you can hear the tanks making sounds, the helicopters blades spinning, and even the soldiers talking about the war and things back home. And if you're wondering, overall voice acting is pretty average grim solider stuff we've heard before, especially for the briefings.

There's usually a dim war/battle music score playing in the background and it fits the game well but again doesn't stand out as a set piece that you'll remember after playing the game.

This is entirely what the game was designed for; the gameplay. And it both succeeds and fails in a few different areas.

First off this is a strategy game casualized with a smaller amount of unit types, and cutting the amount of units per side to 12. You play from a 3rd person perspective but cannot move around the entire map like a typical RTS game. You're restricted to being able to see what you see from any of your units. In other words, you can swap between viewing from your rifleman, tanks, choppers, etc, but can't stray too far from them.

Every unit is strong against one type, and weak against another. Rifleman are strong against Engineers, who are strong against any vehicle but only while behind cover or garrisoned in a building. Transports have big mounted machines guns (and can also transport infantry) and can easily take out Gunships (helicopters). Gunships move quickly around the map since they can fly and can easily destroy Tanks. And thus the triangle is complete with Tanks being most effective against Transports. Rifleman are pretty much weak against everything except Engineers. In addition there's an Artillery unit that shoots at ground units far across the map and is generally good for taking any ground unit out, but it's not overly powerful unless you have more than 1 setup. The Artillery is weak against Tanks, Gunships, and Engineers. There's also a command vehicle which can give you a large overhead map of the battlefield instead of just the small mini map you get in the top right corner, but it's a fairly weak unit and if you choose to have one you'll probably just want to hide it somewhere where the enemy can't get to it. As a bonus it has 4 protective ground units that carry machine guns and can be sent to defend other units or the command vehicle.

It's a simple rock, paper, scissors way of doing things that keeps things easy to understand but at the same time you still always have to be on the ball. If you send in your Gunships to take out some Tanks, you better make sure there's no Transports in the immediate area or you can see bye bye to your Gunships. In addition, in certain modes when you're losing by a significant amount you'll gain access to a nuke or the ability to crash one of your opponents uplink. However, if you use one of them it gives your enemy the ability to fire back with the same things. Adds another layer of strategy; should I or shouldn't I?

Now all this is useless without a easy to use interface to move things around, and RTS games have never been all that fantastic on the console. This is where Ubisoft's idea came from; and thus the voice interface was born. The game controls in 2 ways; the controller and the headset. You'll pretty much need to use both to be the best you can be. The analog sticks control the camera, but you can also select units and press X while targeting something to make it go to that location, or attack whatever unit you're targeting. In this sense the game can be played entirely without a headset, but it's the headset that makes things both more fun and work faster. You simple hold down the right trigger on your controller, say a set of commands, and let go to confirm that command. For example, if I see some enemy tanks coming that have been designated Hostile 3 (the game automatically #'s units based on the order you see enemies. The first enemy you see is 1, 2nd is 2, etc.) then you look at the bottom of your screen to see what unit # your gunship is and say, Unit 4 attack Hostile 3. It's that simple and 95% of the time your voice will be recognized, it's a great sys