I'll be honest - the first time I heard about this game I thought it was just going to be a fairly average RTS being pimped because of its voice controlling gimmick. However, after getting some hands-on time with this yesterday in Ubisoft's private booth, I have somewhat revised my opinion - this game looks cool.

Obviously the big feature in this is the voice control system, giving you the ability to give orders to your troops without having to do more than hold down a trigger button and rattle off a few words. The fact that it is a stellar-looking next-gen RTS game is almost overlooked.

The voice control is amazingly easy to use, and it is surprisingly really accurate - in the 45 minutes I spent in front of this game I didn't see it make a single mistake, and this was using voice control almost exclusively. The number of commands it can recognise is impressive - from what I saw you can give almost any order possible from the game using combinations of the voice commands.

Even doing things like group orders is a piece of cake - simply speak thusly: "Unit 2 plus unit 3 secure Sierra", and those two units will mosey over to Sierra point to capture it. If they get attacked on the way you can interrupt them by moving the camera onto the enemy and just say "unit 2 attack target", and they'll do it.

Any order you can give by voice you can also give with the controller, so if you don't like the idea of speaking to your TV or if you're in an environment where you can't talk too loudly then never fear, you can still play it to your hearts content.

However, it looks like the voice commands will add an interesting new element of micromanagement to the game - as you can command units that are off-screen without having to move the camera over to them (as you would have to do in a normal RTS game), a skilled player could be managing a group of units directly on screen using the control pad, and simultaneously dispatching troops across the map and engaging the enemy in different locations, all with a few well chosen voice commands.

The voice control will work out-of-the-box with English, French, Italian, German and Japanese. Interestingly Chinese is apparently not a supported language, which I thought was a little weird given the game is being made by Ubisoft's Shanghai studio.

In terms of gameplay, the core mechanics of the strategy genre have been tweaked a little bit to offer some new challenges. There are several gameplay modes but the main one I saw was a standard capture-and-hold style, with the goal to capture as many control points around the map as possible and fight off the enemy, who is doing the same thing and, of course, trying to kill you dead.

There's not a huge variety of units in the game - a couple of infantry classes, a few vehicles and some airborne units. The relationships between these are fairly clearly defined - you need infantry to take control points, but they are vulnerable to tanks, which are vulnerable to attack choppers, which are vulnerable to anti-air units, and so forth. This simplified structure means more emphasis on overall strategy and clever tactical work, instead of having to focus on extreme micro-management of a huge host of different unit types.

One interesting feature is how the designers dealt with the standard fog of war you'd expect to see in an RTS. There's actually no fog of war in this game - the camera viewpoints are all locked to your units, so you can only see what they can see (well, in truth its probably a little bit more as the camera is just above them, but it's certainly not your typical top-down godlike perspective). Having only line of sight to the battlefield obviously means you need to keep a careful eye on where your troops are so you're aware of what parts of the map you have covered.

Multiplayer has a few interesting bits and pieces as well - the most notable of which I thought was the concept of units that you can upgrade and will persist between multiplayer games. While my first thought was the chaos that would ensue when players with better units started battling vanilla players, apparently this has been factored into the game design very carefully and lots of work has been done on the balancing side - a skilled player should always be able to beat a less-skilled player even if they have upgraded units.

EndWar is coming for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - I was initially excited when the guy demoing the game for me told me it would also be on PC, but the press conference indicated that it's only going to be on consoles, so that's a bit of a bummer.

Overall, this is shaping up to look like an impressive title. It's too soon to tell if voice commands will be the new uber micro that RTS games have come to know and love, but the simple fact that it literally allows you to do two things at once - assuming your concentration skills are up to the task! - could mean interesting times ahead. Definitely a title worth keeping an eye on.