WMD: Delta
Because EndWar will only allow you to field a maximum of twelve units at any given time, battles are generally tight and promote small battle groups. As your units win battles, they gain combat experience and rise in rank. Increased rank grants access to high-level abilities that you can purchase in the Barracks (like Deep Strike, which enables you to drop your infantry anywhere on the battlefield). The small number of units combined with the growth of those units through combat experience makes each unit a precious commodity, worth spending time and effort to improve.
That's why it's all the more troubling when Defcon kicks in (initiated when a battle is nearing its end) and WMD restrictions are lifted. When you hit Defcon and you're winning, your enemy receives clearance to use a weapon of mass destruction that can be deployed against any target in the battle space. WMDs are hugely destructive (as their name implies) and pose a significant threat to a large number of fielded units. If a unit is caught low on health when the WMD goes off, they could die, losing all of their rank and abilities.
While playing with higher-ranked units, you may be suddenly overcome by a surge of protective emotions, but don't worry, this is natural. Besides, you may want to heed those feelings, as the possibility of losing all of the work that goes into building a high-ranked unit is upsetting, to say the least. On higher difficulty settings your enemies will drop WMDs as soon as they become available, so be on your guard. EndWar can get really messy really fast.
Theater of Blood
Taking EndWar online is every bit as fun as it is in single-player, but you get a gigantic semi-persistent planet to play with. The Theater of War mode is a lot like the single-player game except that there are real people playing all of the different battles (or most of them, if the servers aren't filled to capacity). It's easy to jump in and jump out despite the fact that the overall battle continues whether you participate or not. This can be a bit of a buzz kill if you get really into a session and have to leave before it ends, but individual servers take several hours to reset, so there's always the chance that it will be there when you get back.
Fighting against real people isn't as different as you might imagine however, because EndWar's AI is pretty slick and will act almost as erratically as a human opponent. Since each AI commander has a built-in personality (like favoring precision tank strikes, for example), you can almost get to know their behavior over time, but even then AI commanders will still surprise you with out-of-character behavior.
Curiously, the southern hemisphere isn't participating in this World War, so Australia and many other countries are no-shows. This doesn't seem to truncate the single-player campaign as much as we'd expected it would, but including more continents could have offered some more diverse environments.
As a real-time strategy game, EndWar is an intimate and deeply nuanced experience. The variety in the three factions with their unique unit upgrades and the tactics that go with them (garrisoned snipers are incredibly effective once you've earned the ranks to get them) promise extended replayability. The voice command system is the biggest technological breakthrough in EndWar, but it's important to note that you can play the entire game without ever using voice command and it is every bit as solid an RTS. Selecting and grouping units is a snap and that means that you are free to focus on directing your forces rather than managing the minutiae. By virtually any measure we can think of, EndWar wins.
