Tom Clancy's EndWar Preview

As far as the visuals are concerned, Ubi claims EndWar has the quality of recent Ghost Recon games, which they've further seasoned with approximately 1000 soldiers and vehicles on screen at once (in real-time, of course), fully destructible environments and so on.

Things should become even more fun when players start taking part in the different online modes. While Ubi hasn't revealed much about two of the modes: Siege and Annihilation, the names sound intriguing. What has been revealed is that multiplayer matches will be fought across 40 different territories in the game. Similarly to the single-player, unit upgrades will be available and if a squad dies, they really die. To put it another way, any effort invested into their improvement won't matter, since you'll have to start from scratch. Persistent squads emphasize the function of experience. Of course, when your rookie squad comes across a more powerful opponent, you might want to consider allying yourself with a player controlling experienced units.

The creators of EndWar are really determined to make this game work well on consoles. In fact, the game was built for consoles from the ground up, as opposed to porting it from the PC, the way it's usually done with modern-day RTS games. Hopefully, this focus on the console design will pay off, gameplay wise.

Although the game may appear overambitious, the developers still have enough time to tweak things and maybe treat us to a public demo or multiplayer beta before the full version hits stores (which should be some time in Q1 2008). More details are sure to be revealed in the meantime, so stay tuned.