In the interest of full disclosure, I love Command and Conquer. I've played the past 3 versions that have come out and I was in the beta for #4. This game is supposed to be the end of the series dealing with Tiberium and Kane. But instead of a great story and traditional gameplay, your going to find something completely different. But not all bad...
The campaign is no big interest, there are plenty of traditional type missions for you to play on both Nod and GDI. The cutscenes and in game cinematics are all right but nothing like Red Alert 3 or even Kane's Wrath. I would have preferred if EA had gone the traditional route on this one in terms of storytelling. Joe Kucan as all ways is great as Kane. I really DO love the way he plays him. I wish this wasn't the last one. Maybe he will be back. That would be sweet. The biggest drawback to their new non-professional actor storytelling is the lack of punch to the cheesy performances and in most cases it leaves the player really not caring what happens to the characters. The essence of the story is that the world is being destroyed by Tiberium and Kane has offered to join forces with GDI to stem the spread of Tiberium and eventually dwindle it. This premise is fine but without the Scrin, I was all ready less interested in the campaign when I began. Unfortunately this didn't get better. The tutorial missions are pretty terrible and while the average player will probably fly through them at a break neck pace. There will be some of you that feel the intensely guided nature of them; is just too annoying to fathom. It's too bad they cannot be skipped.
The gameplay here has changed. There are no more resources and your army hasn't gotten ALOT smaller. You won't be building structures or dropping your favorite units into a mad rush against the enemy. No, you have one structure; it's called a Crawler. This structure allows you to build a small number of units and pit them against your foes in control point type battles. There can be as much as 10 people playing in mulitplayer either on the side of Nod or that of GDI. As a Commander you earn XP either in the Campaign or in the Multiplayer. This XP moves you up in the ranks and gives you new units and new technology. This allows you to be more effective. However, in the beginning your going to need to play it really low profile so that you don't just become a target for someone with a more developed tech tree. You must move up that tech tree by grabbing crystals and dropping them back into spawn zones. If your Crawler is destroyed, you do respawn after a few minutes. But your team is going to lose some major points to your opponents; so you might not want to do it too often. Spawning, whether it's the first time or the fourth you can choose between three different classes: Offense, Defense, or Support. These different classes give you different powers and units. You can make a go of any of the classes. My limited experience is that you might not want to make a habit of changing classes mid-round.
Mulitplayer is by and large the main reason you will want to pick this game up. During the beta, tons of people started fresh and plenty of people had to start over with square one units. Anyone who had earned their higher rank, easily schooled others who had not. Because of this, the game is perhaps more balanced and more in depth than the previous Command and Conquers. Because you can no longer tank spam, or solider rush your opponents it forces the player to understand the few units they do have and how they work. Also, not concentrating on one class throughout your experience with the game can also hinder your proficiency with all the units. By the definition of this result the game seems to be deeper than the previous versions. However, the general strategy is much simpler here.
The problems with mulitplayer are pretty simple to explain. No automatch, it just doesn't work. No, way of finding a match other than to look at them and pick one. No dedicated servers and you MUST be connected all the time or your progress doesn't count. Considering how stable the game client is, this can be a challenge. But what I've found is that the game just crashes completely rather than knocking me offline. So I guess that's better, right? Not really. But all in all, the multiplayer is fun and I could put up with the problems for now. Hopefully a patch is incoming. For fans of games like Warhammer 40K 2 Dawn of War and Company of Heroes they will certainly love this game. However, for fans of the previous game, they will find very little of what they love about the brand.
EA has managed to bring some beautiful graphics and some descent audio. The orchestral tracks, while I rarely listen to them, are certainly fitting for this game. I did enjoy around half of the FMV scenes. So it wasn't a total loss on the campaign side. I do truly love the multiplayer side of the game. The game is incredible, but they probably should have gone for a purely multiplayer game. Perhaps leaving the campaign for an add-on or something when it was completely ready or not at all. It's a tragedy that this package is such a mixed bag. I truly love the multiplayer, but I'm not sure I can recommend a $50 game for only half of it. So take my review for what it's worth. I love the multiplayer, but the rest... See you on the battlefield Commanders...
1 comment:
Find and pick some good things from you and it helps me to solve a problem, thanks.
- Henry
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