Turns out all those right-wing politicians were correct. The road to peace is not lined with the hemp trousers of a million tree-hugging hippies, but by the clear and present danger of attack upon oneself. Like the diplomat bearing a treaty in one hand and a knife in the other, it seems society is held together by the thinnest margin of impending doom. Well, the story wasn’t going to be about fuzzy bunnies hopping about a field, was it?

For many decades, poses EndWar, worldwide peace has been kept by the one thing you’d think least likely to result in fewer deaths: the widespread proliferation of nuclear arms. However, come the year 2020, American technological research has advanced to such a stage missiles can be plucked from the sky post-launch, at a stroke removing the overarching threat that made traditional battles for territory pointless. All of a sudden, Europe becomes less interested in passing legislation about the maximum size of sausages in Bavaria, forming instead a unified fighting force to take on this new threat. What’s more a resurgent Russia, buoyed by immense wealth from plentiful oil reserves, chucks its hat in the ring, probably with an insult about everyone else’s mothers to boot. When an American space station is reduced to rubble on the launch pad by, wait for it, ‘terrorists’, all hell breaks loose and war is declared. Probably via a red flashing beacon and hooter, alongside sound effects from Noel’s House Party. At least, that’s how we imagine the world will end…

When events move to the battlefield, Ubisoft’s watchword is most definitely ‘accessibility’. Catering to a console market not used to the kind of intense micromanagement the likes of Rome: Total War might demand, the ability to farm, mine or tend to resources is almost completely done away with. There are no family members to gain experience points, no sheep to cull and no advisors popping up every ten minutes to express concern that water pollution is rising by two percent, year on year. All you have to worry about is quashing all foes moving onto your turf, with indiscriminate and immediate violence. Thing is, it ain’t all about sending as many young men as possible to their maker before time. Each of EndWar’s 40 maps contains a total of six ‘uplink’ points. Assuming (and then maintaining) control of at least half of these for a short period of time brings sweet victory, followed by equally sweet champagne. Sounds simple enough, and while some maps are best tackled by a race to the centre point with whichever of the seven featured units proves your fastest, one or two added factors add some necessary depth. For starters, the act of capturing an uplink amounts to much more than sticking your proverbial flag in the sand. Once activated, these blue triangles of warmongering delight allow access to certain extra curricular upgrades, dependent on which of the three factions – Russia, Europe or US – you have chosen.

The forceful, dominant Russians will be able to call on small scale (but still notoriously deadly) nuclear attacks, wiping out entire squadrons in a flash. The more technologically minded European forces might wish to employ electronic warfare, claiming an uplink post as their own when not even physically there. The Americans may resort to good, old-fashioned air strikes, suitable for warfare of all reality levels, from Worms to Medal Of Honor. Under all circumstances, seizing control of uplink points proves very good news indeed, tipping the balance of war beyond its previously basic success parameters. Altering this precarious balance further still is the DEFCON state, achieved once one side is in control of half (or more) of the available uplink points. Allowing the proverbial goalkeeper’s despairing dive, certain yet more powerful weapons come into play, including tactical lasers raining down from the sky, all offering the possibility of snatching victory from the jaws of defeat.

The major eye-catching feature the Shanghai team has trumpeted is their alternate control scheme. It’s a whole lot more impressive than switching the right analogue to move and the left to look, we can tell you. Rather than forcing players to drain their reserves of fat actually moving their fingers to whatever command they wish to use, a walkie-talkie system has been employed. Holding the right trigger briefly allows players to give orders verbally, using a modular set of commands cleverly designed to avoid confusion. Assigning each uplink point a Police Camera Action lettered code, shifting units becomes a breeze. What’s more, the system coped admirably throughout X360’s test session with a range of diverse accents, from heavy Ubisoft employee French to brash and broad Australian.

Say you wanted your engineers to cross the map, take down any resistance at a given uplink point then take it – it’d be a simple matter of uttering ‘engineers, secure, delta’. Say you want both your tanks and helicopters to provide cover to your on-foot engineers while doing so? Simple: ‘Create group, tanks, helicopters, engineers. Group one, secure, delta’. Piece of cake. Similarly swift commands can be dealt out prompting units to gather wherever your crosshair lies, attack hostile units (by numbers assigned to them), quickly move the camera to an uplink point, unit or crosshair position – basically, any order or piece of information a commander might wish to give or receive. Of course, alternative arrangements are provided by D-pad use to cycle through units, and a bumper and directional system to navigate the commands themselves, so wannabe generals interested in their own vanity retain face. Throwing yet another way to interact with a videogame into the mix does prove entertaining enough to persist with how awkward and fresh it initially feels however, a style of control that will only be bettered once some developer decides waving your arms about in the air equals entertainment. Oh yeah…

Of course, when we’re talking cool stakes, we’re only at the level of someone leaning against the wall at a party, or perhaps a monkey with one of those funky fedoras on. When it comes to what EndWar offers in terms of multiplayer, we’re in proverbial mega- Fonzie territory. Keen to take best advantage of a story entrenched (geddit?) in worldwide warfare, Ubisoft’s Shanghai studio took a glance at Xbox Live and made everything just that little bit more real.

You see, entering the online sphere at any point will present players with diagrams showing the fronts on which war is being fought, all over the planet. These lines will be determined, quite literally, by every single battle fought between strangers across the globe, every second of every day. Each of the territories, to explain more fully, will have win/ loss records attached to it that, every day or so, will be captured by one faction (US, Europe or Russia), based upon which one of the three was victorious upon it the most times during that time period. Consequently, lines of conflict are constantly shifting, until such a point as the last remaining scrap of land is claimed by a dominant superpower, and the war is declared over. Luckily, unlike real life Ubisoft will have the power to reset the globe and allow hostilities to resume. Now ain’t that just grand?!

As for the mechanics of how it’ll work on the ground, a maximum of 18 individual units per side, amounting to well over a thousand soldiers if for some bizarre reason you want to fight with just infantry, will be sub-divided between up to 12 players. All of this will maintain, spouts Ubisoft’s most spotty, bespectacled employee, a constant 30 frames per second – a fact it’s hard to argue with.

Rather than allowing control to be switched at any point in some hot-swapping disordered nightmare, each player will instead be constantly behind a set group of units, for example three in a field of 18 controlled by half a dozen players. This way, co-ordination (as it should be) will prove the greater factor in who flees home, wrapped in their own tattered flag, and who dines at the captain’s table. This is where the game’s system of upgrades to really quite basic units comes into its own. Each faction will have over 300 tweaks that can be made to each of its basic unit types. Sniper training, armour-piercing shells, activedenial shields – a whole banquet of pugilistic delights awaits units tough enough to escape the battlefield with their lives. Of course, these units can then be kept by players before being re-deployed next time they decide a little online action floats their boat. Before long, a system whereby different clan members can quite heavily specialise in different directions will emerge, allowing for ever-closer territorial spats between increasingly powerful foes – now who doesn’t want that (well, apart from your enemies). Players will no doubt also be happy to note that normal voice communications will be possible simply by not depressing your walkie-talkie trigger. Much like in real life, in fact.

Aside from conquest mode earlier described, in which players must capture uplink posts to assure success, several other modes will also make the final cut. Slightly less interesting (at least, certainly so in the upgrade-free code we sampled, on the grounds players have no stake in a basic set of units), was ‘annihilation’, in which the war is won in traditional fashion: seeing the enemy, then making quickly sure it’s not possible to see them. More intriguing given the development team’s background is siege mode, a Rome: Total War-style assault set exclusively in EndWar’s city locations. Whether in Paris, Washington DC, Moscow or elsewhere, one player will be handed control of some central embattlement, while the other tries to burn their house down. If the difference between villagers with sharpened stones on the end of poles and superpowers armed with nuclear warheads and microwave technology adds as much to this experience as it should, we’re definitely in for one hell of an intense experience.

Sabotage mode, finally, will cover similar territory, asking players simply to protect certain strategically precious positions for a set period of time, before presumably their foe is asked to do the same. Hey, it’s not like they will be defenseless, or anything.

Tom Clancy’s EndWar is trying a little to be all things to all bloodthirsty generals. With its complete lack of magic, practically an RTS staple, it will still manage to please purists who, regardless of the invention of all kinds of futuristic death rays, still want to see soldiers brought onto the battlefield from the end of a dangling rope. This way, Ubisoft Shanghai is looking to bring a little spectacle to the genre, somehow shoehorning the Gears Of Warstyle over-the-shoulder camera into the most unusual of places, and with very good reason. Approaching large buildings or environmental features unaware of what’s behind them, not because some deliberately blinding in-game map won’t show you, but as men on the ground would see nothing, is really quite a refreshing leap within the genre, and while it’s not necessarily going to please longstanding followers, a little change never hurt anyone. While EndWar’s voice-activated controls really do cope very well with a range of different accents, it’s clearly the online aspect of it all that excites us the most. The opportunity to basically play out World War Three against other like-minded generals fills us with strange things we like to call ‘emotions’, and, peaceloving folk that we are, we could only wish all wars were fought in this way. That, or between 50-foot tall transformers, shooting lasers from their eyes and casting tower blocks to the ground with a single swipe. But then again maybe we just read too many comic books…

Dave Shaw