2008 has been a banner year for real-time strategy games on the Xbox 360, where ports of PC success stories such as Supreme Commander and World in Conflict have joined forces with day-and-date console iterations of the Command & Conquer franchise among others to make for a redoubtable line-up indeed - but however successful the core gameplay of these releases, a single factor has held each of them from greatness: the control system. There was much ado about a similar problem a few generations ago, when first person shooters started arriving on home consoles - could a controller ever emulate the pinpoint accuracy of a keyboard and mouse? There's no disputing that now: of course it couldn't. But it could come close; and when developers began to build games from the ground up with their intended platforms in mind, close was good enough.

As a cursory glance at the FPS-heavy line-up of Microsoft's current-gen console demonstrates, a little aim assist goes a long way. Sadly, for all their innovative gimmickry, none of this year's RTS ports have evidenced such an effective shortcut. In games where precise unit management is of paramount importance, control has remained clumsy and slow, leading some to question whether the genre has a place on consoles at all. Tom Clancy's EndWar is a gratifying answer to such doubts and though a few disappointing omissions mean that it may not change the face of real-time strategy forever, it stands as the first console game to successfully replicate the experience of a mouse and keyboard RTS.

Coming soon to a city near you, apparently, the Third World War has long been a loaded premise and a favourite go-to for politically inclined creators of books, movies, comics and videogames, one and all. EndWar has as its particular apocalypse a chillingly true-to-form future in which three global superpowers are at war over the last remaining oil reserves. An extended tutorial chronicles the build-up to the conflict, wherein tensions are at an all time high between the United States of Europe, America, and a Russia re-energised by its discovery of these scarce natural resources. The isolated skirmishes that set the whole sordid affair in motion are well utilised as a training ground for the voice-based control that makes EndWar so unique in its field - as international anxieties mount, you're learning how to phrase commands so that the game understands them. Hold in the right trigger to begin speaking and you'll see that the limited selection of aural inputs is arranged in something like a tech tree. Say "unit" from the first column of choices and a second array of sub-categories opens up, handily depicted onscreen to avoid potential confusion; select a numbered unit and you can order it to attack a particular enemy, move to a rally point, evacuate from the field of battle or any one of a number of other commands. All of this might seem a lot to wrap your head around - as though to say that the very notion of controlling a game with your voice isn't pretty sci-fi in itself - but the learning curve is gentle; there are no bases to be built and the opposition forces are initially weak, while the select few units you have control over seem overpowered by comparison.

After a minute or so of "repeat after me" exercises, EndWar appears to have a startlingly accurate handle on the idiosyncrasies of your voice, although slurring and mumbling won't do I'm afraid, but neither do you have to perfectly enunciate every syllable of the Queen's English. Imagine that your tanks and transports are ever so slightly hard of hearing and your commands won't fail often enough to become an annoyance. Your mileage may vary - I can't speak to how representative my appalling roster of accents are (Irish, Australian and American, if you must know) - but even these weren't enough to trip up the game's impressive voice recognition system. A half hour into the prelude, I was ordering my strike team around the maps with confidence, dispatching gunships to back up units under fire and sending squads of engineers around the flank of uplinks under enemy ownership, as much thanks to the streamlined unit types as the intuitive control mechanic. There are more traditional controls on offer, too, so don't count EndWar out if your headset - like so many unsuspecting Xbox accessories - has crossed over to the great scrapyard in the sky: you can use the d-pad to select units and issue commands with the right thumbstick aiming the camera at your choice of target. Assuredly, however, you'll get the most out of the experience by tacking back and forth between the two options; some orders are simpler to issue with a quick trip through the control tree, while the lean phrasing of others mean that they're quicker and more rewarding to say than to find.

The technology is fantastic then, but for all its immediacy and precision, you wouldn't want to be playing a complex Command & Conquer clone with it. No doubt the inevitable sequel - this is a fledgling Tom Clancy franchise after all - will dramatically expand the range of key input phrases; as it is, the gameplay is pared-down to its utmost essentials and I don't know that I'd want it any other way. The actual strategy of EndWar is reduced to an uncomplicated series of rock-paper-scissors encounters: each unit has such clearly defined strengths and weaknesses that you'll grasp the mechanic effortlessly. Gunships are great against tanks but weak against transports while tanks, on the other hand, can take out transports but fall victim to gunships. Later in the game, the three core units are accompanied by infantrymen, artillery units, command vehicles and engineers, but the new additions to your squad factor into the matrix of relationships smoothly and logically, and while the omission of base building will disappoint some veteran RTS enthusiasts, EndWar is a more focused game for Ubisoft Shanghai's potentially divisive decision. The meat and potatoes of this game is the conflict - the empowerment of having such direct control over your armies as they march toward the targets you've designated - and voice commands or not, the opportunity to spend five minutes turtling up around your barracks would only have hurt the sense of urgency that proves so vital to the cumulative experience.

When you're done with the tutorials, within which you make the most of the units and the battlegrounds you're given, the campaign opens up to reveal its true nature - a grid-based globe that's evenly divided between the three colour-coded factions. To start with, you pick a superpower to fight for; patriotic to the last, I pledged my efforts to the blue team, which coincidentally represented the European federation, and systematically attacked the orange dots, which just so happened to be America, until I'd reduced its share of the world map to just four of the forty-two potential battlegrounds. Russia - the green dots - gleefully joined me in my campaign, only to betray the sacred bonds of our trust and push for a fight halfway through the total running time. They got one.

It seems that the victory conditions of World War III is to gain control either over all three faction's capital cities or twenty-eight grid squares irrespective of their strategic importance. On the normal difficulty setting you can meander through the campaign in less than four hours, but you should treat your first play through as an introduction to EndWar's streamlined control system and RTS mechanics rather than its main attraction. You're best served picking a second superpower and turning the difficulty level up a notch; you'll find the AI much less scattershot and the automated between-turn activity on the other fronts of your faction's territory not so favourable. You don't fight every battle, you see, although your victory rallies the troops engaged in battle elsewhere and, conversely, your defeat reduces the likelihood of victory in other locations - otherwise, it's as though a dice rolls between turns to determine the outcome of the automated battles raging in the distance.

The replay value is high, considering that each superpower boasts its own range of unique unit types and abilities, which you can unlock with the credits that you earn depending on your performance before allocating to those of your troops who survive through enough battles to see a few promotions. However, the best real-time strategy games earn their stripes through multiplayer and EndWar impresses in this respect too. Beyond the three campaigns, you can sink a significant amount of time into the so-called Theatre of War, where you must pick a side - credit incentives are on offer for joining the underdogs - and fight in a grand multiplayer arena that updates the world map every twenty-four hours, according to the winners and losers of each day's conflicts. The honest to god persistence of the experience is what truly stands out about this mode, as well as what holds it back: while it's satisfying to see your skirmishes affect the grid in as real a sense as in single player, if you don't play every day then you can expect to be baffled by the sudden shifts in power between sessions, and if you do (play every day, that is) then there are far too few battles to keep you occupied for more than an hour. It's certainly not a perfect system but it nevertheless embellishes all your actions in what would otherwise be a series of meaningless multiplayer skirmishes with a similar feeling of immediacy as the offline campaigns impart.

Whether you're online or not, EndWar isn't without its fair share of problems. For all the focus that its streamlined mechanics bring, there's so little to do in the moments between encounters that micromanagement addicts will not be constantly amused. There are no resources to be gathered nor technologies to be researched or bases to shore up; short of scrolling through the tight viewpoints of each of your units, you're left raising an eyebrow at your battalion's unreliable path-finding as they crawl from rally point to rally point. Not only that, but despite the automatic nature of much of the game, there are some odd missteps, such as the pedantic requirement that you must actively engage the special abilities of all upgraded units. Worse still are the nearly game-breaking WMDs that the losing side are granted, which if used wisely can not only level the playing field but entirely turn the tide of battle. There's not enough to differentiate the various modes of play either; unless you're on the defending team, Raid, Conquest and Siege run much the same course.

It's disappointing, too, to see such a dearth of narrative and character when World War III has been the spark of so many great tales. Three superpowers going to war over oil is pretty much the extent of the story and the static images and stilted voiceovers of your faction's commanding officers do nothing to humanise the conflict. The camp cinematics that a successful mission in Kane's Wrath or Red Alert 3 rewards you with are positively inspirational next to the empty monologues that EndWar offers, and while I'm sure that the bare-bones presentation of the latter is a touch more authentic than Command & Conquer's notorious alternative, the experience's lack of contrivance counter-intuitively leaves it wanting some much-needed context.

EndWar's most surprising deficiency, however, is its lacklustre graphics; you expect production values from a game that sports Tom Clancy's name - it might not be fair but it's true and, while they needn't be works of art, like a good summer blockbuster action movie, they should pack a punch and a respectable budget. To be frank, EndWar looks suspiciously like an enhanced port of a PSP game. Wisps of smoke do not an explosion make. There's noticeable pop-up and textures aren't nearly detailed enough to justify the camera being fixed so close to the ground. The audio engineering is much more successful at communicating the highs and lows of battle, although the sound effects are sparse enough that they don't overpower your own voice. On the other hand, 99 Men's insipid theme song - played over the end credits - sounds enough like Linkin Park that it'll leave a nasty taste in your mouth.

Despite its faults, Tom Clancy's EndWar stands as a welcome departure from the quick and dirty reworkings that so many real-time strategy games have undergone in the transition from mouse and keyboard to control pad. The voice recognition system is simple and surprisingly effective - other developers would do well to build future releases around something similar - and should you still hunger for the immediacy of its gameplay after three campaigns across three difficulties, not to mention an infinite number of AI skirmishes, while the persistent Theatre of War means that EndWar should have long legs indeed. The technical hitches are distracting - a little more graphical polish and any hint of character at all would have done it the world of good - but Ubisoft's latest Tom Clancy game could still prove as popular as its FPS counterparts, given time. EndWar is an RTS built for consoles from the ground up and its streamlined interface and single-minded mechanics make a powerful case for the future of the genre, if not this particular franchise, on platforms other than the PC. If you're a fan of the genre then you owe it to yourself to take a look, because while the presentation will undoubtedly disappoint, the successful voice control mechanics are likely to get you rather excited.

Reviewed by Niall Rough for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).