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Man, this past month has just been loaded with the release of Real Time Strategy games! With the Starcraft 2 beta, Supreme Commander 2 and now, Command & Conquer 4, I’ve really got my nose deep in these games. Too bad I still suck at them! Seriously, it’s tough for a casual gamer to become good at any of these because each one has unique mechanics and requires more than the week of time I’m able to devote to them to really become competitive. So with all of these new strategy games available, which one are you supposed to pick up? Well Electronic Arts was kind enough to provide me with a copy to review for you, so of course I’ll give you my honest thoughts on the game. If you’d like to see a bunch of HD game-play footage beyond what I show in the review, check out my other channel, ZeitgeistOther, and make sure to follow me on Twitter to get daily updates on the games I’m playing and my upcoming review schedule! Released for the PC for fifty dollars, here’s Command & Conquer 4: The Tiberian Twilight.

For the past year or so following the events of the last Command & Conquer, NOD and GDI have been working together on the Tiberium Control Network, which is essentially the opening of a portal to the Scrin home world that should essentially remove the Tiberium from the planet. Recall in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, the alien race known as the Scrin had invaded the planet in the middle of the NOD and GDI war giving you the ability to control 3 different and unique factions, much like in Starcraft. Well this time around the Scrin are not actually in the game, so it’s back to the standard good vs evil.

The game begins with you playing as the GDI for a few missions until a political battle erupts requiring you to choose whether you want to follow Commander James and the GDI or follow Kane and NOD. Basically the world is siding with Kane and his plan to open the portal to the Scrin world and Commander James doesn’t want to have anything to do with it. On top of all of this, a rogue NOD faction under the command of a man named Gideon is stirring trouble for both of the playable factions.

To be honest, I didn’t really care for the story of the game. The characters and overall plot of the previous game were much more interesting. Luckily, the new and unique game-play mechanics make up for my lack of interest in the mediocre story.

Typically in Real Time Strategy games, including all of the previous iterations of Command & Conquer, you build your base, harvest some kind of currency, build buildings, base defenses and amass a large army to destroy your opponent. Well things have changed. In Tiberian Twilight, you are now given an option between one of three crawlers: An offensive, defensive and support mobile base that creates all of your units. Each crawler has a different set of units that it can build, as well as provide upgrades and sometimes support buildings including turrets and bunkers. That’s it… No more gathering Tiberium, building a massive base or pumping out large armies. In fact, you typically won’t control more than a dozen units at a time as you can only control one crawler and each crawler can only support a limited amount of units. So while I didn’t care for the fact that I couldn’t amass a huge army, I did like that I had to use a LOT more strategy to accomplish my goals.

It only took me about 10 hours to complete both the GDI and NOD campaigns, so there really isn’t that much campaign content. In fact, the GDI campaign is only 10 levels and the NOD is only 7, though I found the NOD campaign to be much more interesting. To spice things up, this time around you have the ability to play all of the campaign missions co-op with several of your friends at a time, while the difficulty adjusts to keep things challenging. There is also support for multiplayer matches of up to 5 versus 5 with customizable bots that can be filled in for human players. You can even designate observers to watch your epic battles.

Being that the crawlers are your only source of unit creation, you now gain experience points as you destroy enemy units and complete missions so that your character levels up, granting you access to new units, upgrades and support buildings. With that, there are simply a TON of different units that you’ll be able to utilize in each battle, and each unit has it’s own strengths and weaknesses. Some may be good at attacking medium vehicles, but can’t attack air. Some may be able to attack air only, but are weak against infantry. So there is a lot of strategy involved in which units you want to use, especially considering you can only control a dozen or so at a time.

Each mission you are allotted a certain number of crawlers and different portions of each mission may require you to swap to a new one. Initially you may need to assault an enemy fortress with an offensive crawler, and then hold your position with the defensive crawler. The offensive crawler has a cannon attached to it to attack foes with the units, the defensive crawler can build tunnels, turrets and bunkers, and the support crawler can use special abilities like repairing units in a large area or creating a mine field.

Something that bothered me as I played was the significant difference in difficulty settings. I started the game on normal and after a few missions I was getting my butt whooped, so I dropped down to easy, but then, it was a cakewalk to the end of the game. There didn’t seem to be a true medium difficulty setting. I like to feel challenged, but not to the point where I’m stressing out for an hour to complete a simple mission. I should have to work for it, but not to the point where I’m pulling my hair out because I can’t fight off 2 enemy crawlers at a time.

The graphics in the game look great, but I really didn’t notice a significant difference over the previous Command & Conquer. The units are highly detailed, the environments look great, and the game ran at a smooth 30 frames per second the entire game with v-sync enabled. Now, it wouldn’t be a Command & Conquer game without the live-action cut-scenes before and after each battle, but the actors this time around I found to be really crappy. The previous titles had some big name actors pop up here and there to spice things up, but this time around they are just really blah. This likely is why I didn’t really get attached to the story.

The music on the other hand was really great. The music in battle, especially for the NOD campaign was freaking awesome and really got me in the mood to kick some ass. All in all, the presentation of the game was just pretty average by what I’d consider today’s standards. Nothing really stood out and wowed me, it was just… average.

So what are my final thoughts on Command & Conquer 4: The Tiberian Twilight? I just wasn’t really attached to the story. The acting was very mediocre and I never really got attached to the characters. The ending of the campaign was kind of stupid, well, just all in all the story kind of sucked. I suppose that’s OK though because the unique game-play is pretty fun and really involves a lot more strategy than the previous titles did. Electronic Arts has done something a little different here by straying from the mechanics of the previous titles, so if you like to build bases and amass large armies, you might not like this title. I also think the removal of the third Scrin faction was a bad move, as it offered a wider range of game-play dynamics. As far as Real Time Strategy games go, this likely could hold you over until Starcraft 2 is released, but I don’t see it being a contender for the RTS market after that. What do you think? Leave your questions and comments below!

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