Voice Control, a gimmick or a boon?
Well, having given voice control a go, I have to say that it adds a brilliant touch of realism to the game with confusion reigning supreme across my entire platoon. No matter what I said or how I said it, the damn thing appears to just randomly select whichever unit it fancies. Call for gunners and watch the tanks become highlighted, tell them to move and then gasp as an unwanted air-strike drops on your troops… Forget your ‘fog of war’, the chaos of a true war can be easily experienced by donning the headset and just trying to get your troops to move out… brilliant!
Now, I’ve really have given the headset and voice control a fair crack as a game that can be near completely voice controlled is a superb idea and allows for accessibility for less able bodied gamers. Sadly, it ain’t going to happen with this one and, other than a few miraculous feats of mobility as gamers throw their screens through windows in frustration, we’ll have to wait until its better implemented elsewhere. Roughly speaking, you’d get the same amount of control using the voice system as you would if you stood on the other side of the room from your PC and randomly whipped the keyboard with a fishing rod.
To get the voice control even close to working you need to have as little background noise as possible. This means you’ll have to use the headset for game sound rather than just as a mike. The sound through the headset just doesn’t compare to my 4.1 speaker set-up, as you’d expect, so the only way to get those beefy, bassy explosions is to use my Sennheisers for sound and sit with the headset around my neck using just the mike. Any other set up either caused too much background noise or was just too tinny for any decent sound experience. Yep, it’s definitely a case of back to the drawing board with this… it’s a great idea but, to be brutally honest, you’ll find yourself battling against the game’s mechanics rather than the game’s AI.
So, now we’ve firmly established that WoS’s so called unique selling point is a) not all that unique and b) not actually worth the bother, how does the rest of the game play?
