Hands-On: Blow Up Your Friends for Fun and Profit in EndWar's Multiplayer

First-person shooters successfully made the transition from the PC to consoles with the first Halo. And that was, oh, about seven years ago now. But real-time strategy makers are still struggling to find an optimal control scheme that successfully maps the genre's keyboard-and-mouse-based gameplay to relatively limited console gamepads. With Tom Clancy's EndWar, Ubisoft is taking a different approach. Instead of trying to make a square game fit in a round hole, the company's Shanghai studio is reinventing the wheel with an entirely new method of camera control and unit selection that eliminates the genre's traditional bird's-eye viewpoint altogether and locks your perspective to the active unit. It's a unique setup that I've been impressed by and optimistic about, the couple of times I've seen the game before.

I got to play a couple of local EndWar skirmish matches last week to see how this style of gameplay maps to a multiplayer scenario. In multiplayer (as in many of the campaign missions), unit resupplies and ultimate victory depend on your acquisition of control nodes scattered around the map. These are labeled with military designations, so you get to feel extra awesome when you're using the built-in voice controls and yelling out "Unit 5, move to Foxtrot!" Sub in other cool names like Alpha, Whiskey, and Tango as necessary. The more of these nodes you control, the more special abilities you unlock and the more reinforcements you can call in. So the multiplayer becomes a straight-up war of attrition, as you first move to grab as many nodes as you can early on and then assail the other guy's captured points, trying to tip the balance in your favor.

EndWar's balance revolves around a specific paper-rock-scissors setup that I managed to use effectively against a less experienced opponent. Your tanks will beat transports, but transports have anti-air guns that will beat helicopters, and then those choppers' aerial bombardment will beat tanks. Rightly assuming that my novice adversary would mass helicopters--because helicopters are awesome, I mean, come on--I doubled up on transports and obliterated his air units, laughing all the while. There are more units than these three, of course--different types of infantry for taking nodes, and a command vehicle with lots of support powers, for instance--but you have to master this three-way balance to stand a chance in a competitive match.

The more territory you hold, the cooler your toys will be.

With such limited camera controls, line of sight is a fundamental concept in EndWar. You can only attack things you can see, and you can only see what your units can see. Well, not quite true in multiplayer; there you can also see what any of your allies' units can see, too. That's simply because you can sling your camera view over to any of their units in addition to your own. Working with units of limited attack range, that's not such a big deal, but when you get access to major weapons like orbital strikes late in the match, it can make a huge difference for you to jump to one of your friendly allied units and zero in on a nearby target that they can see but that you otherwise couldn't have.

The voice controls work surprisingly well in multiplayer--other than the fact that I was sitting next to my opponents and they could hear me verbalizing everything I was doing. The game missed a random command here and there, but it picked up the vast majority of them and put them into immediate practice. Tentatively, I think I'd be comfortable playing through the entire game via headset, but we'll see how that works out once the game is final and I can sit down with it properly.

Ubisoft is planning a "stress test" for EndWar that will be available to people who preorder the game. I'd hoped to show you some video running down a sample mission and the voice controls along with this preview, but the release of the demo version was just pushed back to next Tuesday, October 7. So if you preordered EndWar, hold your horses till next week. Everyone else, look for some new video sometime after TGS. In the meantime, here's a video Ubisoft released detailing the various ultra-destructive, match-ending weapons that tend to become available as you approach victory (or defeat) in a multiplayer skirmish.

I dropped that kinetic strike on my opponent in one of the matches I played, and I can confirm that, yes, it does make a pretty darn nice explosion.