At the recent Ubisoft press event, I got a chance to try out the Ubisoft Shanghai-developed Tom Clancy's EndWar, that voice command-enabled, real-world RTS for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
At its core, EndWar is fairly simple. You command tanks, infantry, helicopters and artillery, all arranged in small unit groupings a la World in Conflict. You capture points. You call in reinforcements. You say things like "task force one, attack hostile three." You feel kind of cool, and a little ashamed at the same time.
The voice recognition works surprisingly well, picking up my words on a noisy show floor without much trouble. In fact, the only bothersome aspect of the whole thing was remembering to hold down the right trigger before talking, and to let it go afterward. Unfortunately, the game does not recognize wanton cursing.
A few minutes into my demo, I had most of the basic voice commands down. The thing is, I'm not sure it actually saved me much time, as the controller works pretty well for basic commands. Often I ended up using a combination of the two... Read more