Last week, we had the opportunity to explore both competitive and cooperative multiplayer in Tom Clancy's EndWar with Team Xbox overlord Tom Price (you can check out his take on our time together over on that fine website). We've seen quite a bit of EndWar already, so we assumed that we'd take poor Tom apart in the competitive multiplayer. Sadly, that was not the case, but it did highlight some important points regarding EndWar's ability to accurately simulate the experience of being a battlefield commander... perhaps even surpassing the classic style of RTS that we've all become accustomed to.
Gimme a Sit Rep
On the battlefield, your success as a commander is directly tied to your ability to gather information accurately and the speed with which you can acquire it. Knowing where your enemy is and what they're up to makes all the difference when it comes to planning out strategy. Get caught with bad intel (or incomplete intel, which may be even worse) and you've already lost the fight. The fact that EndWar seems to be able to communicate this so elegantly through its gameplay takes the real-time strategy genre to a whole new level of accuracy.
EndWar eschews the classic bird's eye view of the battlefield that essentially deifies you by giving you an unrealistic perspective of the action and focuses more on the perspective of individual battle groups. In EndWar you have to rely on your troops to gather the precious information on which any given battle could hinge, so careful management of your assets goes well beyond simply deciding which units to include in your latest rush. You actually have to switch between your platoons to see what's going on, bringing the concept of situational awareness to the forefront. If you want to know what's going on over at Delta, you'd better send somebody over there to check it out or your stale intel could cost you severely... especially if you're playing against a ruthless and canny bastard like Tom Price.
There is one caveat to this lack of sky-high perspective, and that is the command vehicle, which gives you a satellite uplink that you can access by saying, "Sit rep." Sit rep functions like the broader strategy maps that we're familiar with in this type of game and you could play the whole game from this perspective if you chose. Still, you have to choose to field a command vehicle in order to access this feature, and that can be a dicey proposition if what you really need are more troop transports to stop a multi-pronged gunship assault (Tom is fond of those, the jerk). This trade-off between situational awareness and unit strength seems to have a meaningful impact on how you play the game and it's refreshing to see this kind of depth in a console RTS.
