With Tom Clancy's name on the box, you can expect a better than average war story to unfold. EndWar plays out the events that lead up to World War III and the war itself. After the prelude, you pick either the United States, Europe, or Russia for the rest if the war. The map in between missions is grided out over the world map, and it's used to pick which area you will attack or defend in the next mission.

There's no resource or money management to worry about during a scenario. It's purely a tactical game, which is a really a relief for me. I do like to be able to concentrate more on each engagement rather than splitting my attention across a handful of tasks. Each mission allows you to choose your starting unit types, established limits for the number of each type, and allows you to call in more as the scenario unfolds. Units are composed of 4 pieces generally, but you don't give orders to the individuals.

Ok, so what's the big deal with the new control scheme? It's all voice activated, and it works remarkably well. Really the only necessary controls are the analog sticks to control the view from the camera and holding the right trigger to issue a voice command. The game can be played without speaking a word, but unless you can't speak, there's hardly a reason to do any controller commands.

The number of voice commands available is tremendous. It has everything you could want to do in am RTS. The voice recognition is nearly flawless. I can only recall a couple out if my hundreds of orders that didn't go through, and that was likely a vocal volume issue. You also give the orders at a very natural speaking pace and in a regular sentence structure. For instance I may say the following while holding the right trigger: "Unit 2 attack hostile 1. Unit 3 and unit 4 create group. Task group 1 move to target. Unit 6 secure Alpha. Unit 2 camera." The result of which is not only cool in that what I said is actually controlling the game, but useful since these are all things that would have had to be done with mouse movements and clicks or analog stick and button presses.

The engagements are pretty fun, and do require a bit of strategy. The game is hampered a bit by the impossibly close camera, although a command vehicle with the sitrep view alleviates that a bit. The AI is a bit bothersome on both sides. Your own units don't do a very good job of sticking to cover, which mandates a bit of micro management.

EndWar may not be the best RTS on the market, but it certainly breathes new life into the genre on consoles. It gives me great hope for other games in the genre to adapt this control scheme. While the gameplay appeals to me a bit more than hardcore RTS gamers, it could be a turn off for that group. It's certainly worth trying out if for nothing else than the novelty of perfect voice control in a video game.