I was extremely sceptical about this when I downloaded the demo. It’s a console RTS where the primary control method is your voice. As we all know, voice control is useless. Have you ever tried one of those talk-type word processing programs? Say a sentence into a microphone, get a string of gibberish on your page. Or mobile phones: I’ve got a fairly snazzy one, but if I tell it ‘phone mum’, more often than not it tries to call Rob or delete Sam’s contact info or something. How the hell is a game going to work with voice commands?
Pretty damn well, it turns out.
Attach your headset to your controller, hold down the right trigger, give what is described as “a who, what, where command” (for example, ‘unit one, attack hostile unit three’), then release the right trigger and the clever game knows just what to do. Most of the time. Sometimes it gets it wrong, but by and large it’s spot on.
The demo’s a bit rubbish though. You get a single-player level, which is too easy for words: two columns of lightly-armored enemies are approaching Kennedy space centre, where a rocket’s about to be launched. You’ve got three units, and you’ve got to defend the rocket. It’s simplicity itself. Two of your units attack the larger column, the other attacks the smaller one. Then, when the smaller one’s dead, unit three goes and supports units one and two. Another wave of enemies approaches. Simply repeat the original strategy.
The level’s over in under five minutes, and I got an A ranking for it. Without really trying.
You can play a skirmish level on the same map against either a human over Live, or the AI, which is more difficult and diverting (took me 12 minutes. I still got an A though), but I’d have liked another single player level or two. Especially when the demo’s 1.6 gigabytes.
Definitely a game to look out for when it’s released, although I’ll want to rent it first to check out the single-player campaign. From the demo, it seems to revolve around a fairly cliched ‘unknown terrorists are launching multiple attacks against several countries!’ storyline.
