Tom Clancy's Endwar.
It does three things that most RTS's kind of half-ass:
-
The feeling of actually being the commander. Clicking on a unit, then clicking on where you want it to go, is very efficient in function, but hardly feels like it carries any weight since you've already made at least ten clicks to get to the part where you get to play, and have made countless other clicks over the course of your lifetime. Endwar lets you give verbal orders; I'd forgive you for thinking it's a gimmick, but believe me when I say that it completely sells you on your role in the game. When the communication isn't wholly one-sided, you feel not only authoritative, but attached to and responsible for the well-being of your units.
-
Superbly presented combat. I know that a choice few RTS's give you some very pretty effects to look at, but as someone that grew up on the Red Alert series, I'm quite accustomed to having units park at the edge of their effective range and spam the same couple of sound effects and sprites and causes the target transition through all its beat-up textures until it explodes. Endwar is an absolute pleasure to observe; all the units (save for the odd transport chopper) have a wonderfully consistent sense of scale, they're wonderfully animated to the point of being on par with what you'd be fighting alongside in most modern FPS's (particularly the infantry), and it's all very pretty. This is probably the only game (apart from Reach) where I've gone back and watched the replay just to watch events unfold in their all their spectacularly cinematic glory.
-
Effortless multi-tasking (ON A CONSOLE, NO LESS). The voice commands are the main draw of the game, but it can be played entirely with the controller with very little functionality lost. If this leads you to the conclusion that opting to use the voice controls is similar to getting up and enthusiastically acting out all actions while playing Wii when a flick of the wrist would suffice, it's probably because I didn't mention that you use the voice commands and the controller
together. What the game effectively does is gives you two inputs for giving the same commands, which means that managing eight platoons at once becomes nearly effortless; I can keep my eyes on an intense, protracted battle at the center of the map and manage the movement of my platoons, and the second a new unit is deployed to the field, I can say "Unit 2, secure Alpha", sending them off to capture a specific objective without ever having to see them. It's truly wonderful in practice.
Plus, the mechanics are simple, functional, and very fun, which means that you can jump straight into setting up strategies without having to spend an agonizingly long time familiarizing yourself with all the complications that can come back to bite you in the ass when ignored. I
highly recommend this game.