, was that the newest sequel wasn't really a Command & Conquer game. Sure, all the story aspects are present: The struggle between GDI and Nod forces; a world that's grown mostly uninhabitable by uncontrolled tiberium growth; live action full motion video cut scenes featuring Joe Kucan as Kane glowering at you. However, all the gameplay that fans have grown to know has been completely revised to something that's barely recognizable. C&C 4 does away with most of the base building, tank rushing, and many other elements one normally associates with the experience. In its place is something wholly different, but not necessarily better.
Command & Conquer 4 borrows heavily from other real-time strategy games, most notably
Dawn of War 2 and
World in Conflict. The game plays out as a sort of role-playing / real-time strategy hybrid where players take one of three different roles: Offensive, Defensive or Support. Construction yards are now crawlers that switch between being a building and a large walker, often traveling across the battlefield alongside its units. The classes dictate what units players can work with. Offensive class has access to land units like tanks. Defensive class has infantry units, defensive structures and a small handful of vehicles including heavy artillery. Lastly, the Support class mostly includes aircraft and a variety of special abilities to help allies and debuff enemies. Players gain experience by playing missions and destroying enemies, which unlocks new units, upgrades and abilities. Fortunately, players don't have to level each class individually. Experience gained through one class will unlock options with the other ones within the same faction. However, unlike
Dawn of War 2 and
World in Conflict, these classes aren't limited to multiplayer and are adapted into the single player campaign.
This becomes problematic on a number of levels, but the most obvious is the lack of versatility. Players have the option to switch classes during the course of a mission at any time, but this involves shutting down the current crawler and calling in a new one into a drop zone. This process only takes a few seconds, but those seconds are critical in a game with
C&C 4's pacing. Adding to the frustration is the unit cap that becomes increasingly harder to deal with as players gain access to more advanced units. Yes, it forces commanders to be conservative with their unit choices and prevents rushing with a huge wave of Mammoth Tanks, but that's hard to appreciate with some of these missions - especially ones where player is battling up to three other crawlers while charged with escorting convoys to safety. The early parts of the campaign are downright painful, since players don't have access to many units or technology, so it's often difficult to adapt to changing situations. Oddly, tanks and other vehicles can't run over non-armored infantry anymore, which is a serious oversight to us.
In most cases, there's no way to defeat an enemy AI in the campaign. You can destroy enemy crawlers, but they come back after a minute and start pumping out troops again. Instead of feeling relief in taking out one AI then moving on to the next, the game can feel like fighting against the tide. Defensive structures shut down when there's no associated crawler in play, so players can't fortify a position then switch to Offense. Since there's no factory besides the crawler anymore, so engineers can't take over enemy technology except by jumping into the husks of super units, which usually pushes players way past their unit caps in short time.
The two best solutions to getting through the campaign is to either play co-op so different classes can support each other, or playing skirmishes and multiplayer matches to level up. However, there's a world of difference between the co-op that's in
C&C 4 and the kind that was included in
Red Alert 3's campaign. With
RA3, even though the campaign was designed around cooperative play, it felt like a choice. With
C&C 4, the class and unit cap restrictions make it feel almost like a necessity. We were able to soldier through and beat the campaign on our own, but half the time we felt like we were playing with our hands tied behind our backs. This issue speaks to both the game's greatest strength and weakness.
C&C 4 is essentially designed to be a multiplayer game, so the solo experience suffers greatly from it. Practically everything about
C&C 4 is there to drive players toward playing together, including having to log into the EA servers, a persistent online identity, and the chat lobby that's present in main menu.
All of this is a little unsettling, since this is supposed to be the grand finale for the Tiberium Quadrilogy.
Tiberian Twilight caps off a story that's been
fifteen years in the making, starting with
Tiberian Dawn in the 90s. Yet, instead of being the biggest game in the series, things appear decidedly trimmed down. We're back to GDI fighting Nod forces again when the previous game had three distinct factions. There's a renegade splinter Nod faction (which seems kind of redundant when you think about it) that appears in the campaign but aren't playable except through bonus missions. Players assume the role of a war hero that takes up the commander's post again at a time when GDI must join forces with Kane in order to save the planet from the widespread tiberium growth - a move that a lot of hardcore GDI and Nod fundamentalists don't support.
It's not long before players are given a choice between staying the course with GDI or breaking away and following Kane. Don't expect an intricate story with intertwined campaigns that pits duty against morality. The chance to defect happens once, and players are locked into linear campaigns after that. Neither Nod nor GDI will try to convince you to see the light of reason and join them. Too bad, because there were a number of times when we felt disenchanted with how a campaign was progressing and would have gladly jumped ship to the other side. The cinematic videos lose much of the charm they had in previous games. A lot of the dialogue is cheesy and so is the acting. There's one scene in the GDI campaign where two of the actors are crammed shoulder-to-shoulder to fit on a view screen and stare blankly while reciting their lines as a character threatens them with a coup. However, it's worth noting that in order to get any real insight on who Kane is and what he's been doing on Earth for hundreds of years, you have to play the Nod campaign.
Multiplayer is the game's strongest feature, whether it be in co-op or in the competitive arena. Competitive play is what
C&C 4 excels at, where players using different classes work together. The game design works fantastically well in 2v2 or more, but 1v1 matches are considerably less interesting. Still, certain factors hold the game back. The crawler suffers from a major identity crisis. It's the only factory the player gets, so it doesn't make much sense to keep it close to the front line. Also, switching back-and-forth from unit to building mode can become a real hassle, so players need to decide what works best for them: leaving the crawler behind in a secure area or keeping it close at hand so that new units can quickly jump into combat. All the units are really big and often get in each others' way. They also have an annoying tendency to forget attack commands.
Domination, where players compete to capture and hold key control points to accumulate victory points, is the only multiplayer mode. That's too bad, because even though there's a decent selection of maps, some gameplay variety would have been appreciated. The only twist is in tiberium harvesting, which is a mini Capture the Flag game. Units grab tiberium deposits as they appear on nodes and bring them back to designated areas to cash them in for upgrade points. Alternatively, the tiberium crystals can be detonated for extreme area damage, but this might cause unintended side effects. Tiberium only applies to purchasing upgrades and has no bearing on producing units or structures. Low level players don't have much invested in grabbing up tiberium, since they hardly have any technologies to purchase. Even mid level players can get by with grabbing up just a few deposits. No matter what level a player happens to be, resource collection loses all priority once the technologies are purchased. Therefore, tiberium, which has been a key resource and theme in the
Command & Conquer universe, is included here more-or-less for the sake of having it.
We probably wouldn't be making as big of a fuss if this were some sort of spin-off game. Perhaps
Command & Conquer: Tournament would have been a more appropriate title, but we were expecting to play
Command & Conquer 4. So what is there to say about a game that's supposed to be a grand finale, but throws out almost everything fans have come to know about the series? The first
Command & Conquer is credited for influencing and helping to popularize real-time strategy games in the 90s, and its story is concluding with gameplay borrowed heavily from other RTS games. We guess the series really has come full circle. Maybe it's a sign of the times that
C&C needs to radically change in order to broaden its appeal and our vision is clouded by nostalgia. Strictly speaking,
Tiberian Twilight is a great, fast-paced and team-oriented, multiplayer real-time strategy game with a weak solo experience. The game also features a great soundtrack. However, there's no shaking the feeling that it's simply not
Command & Conquer.
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Very in-depth review. After reading it, however, I felt you were probably easy on this game. Having been completely disillusioned by previous C&C games, I knew that this latest game would probably fall far short of being a good game especially with the team overhauling everything that people have come to love about C&C games.
I thought Tiberian Dawn was decent. I thought Red Alert 3 was fun at times but ultimately over the top and horrendous. Just as a quick example that I think summarizes what is wrong with C&C development, take the Japanese faction in RA3. There were some really cool units -- in theory. But once you got to actually use them, the design decisions made no sense. Why would a unit that can obviously shoot land units, need to switch to air-mode? Why would the japanese design such a machine? Sure, it sounds interesting on paper, but then when you get to use it, it's like "oh, this is worthless and cumbersome". And that kind of design plagues C&C. They choose a design and then don't have the courage to scrap it when they realize it's horrible. Then they design the rest of their game balancing around horrible decisions. It ends up being a long list of weird units that kinda don't make any sense and are just there to be different.
The C&C developers should stop trying to create crazy units that make no sense. They should focus on improving the interface and the unit behaviors. I've always felt that that was the most lacking part of C&C. C&C Generals was one of my favorite, though unbalanced, games in the whole series. And that had all very vanilla units.Posted at 10:56AM on Mar 16th 2010 by Eric