Motto: He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past. - George Orwell

 

Philadelphia uplink successful. Welcome back commander.

The year is now 2047, and EVA - the Electronic Video Agent AI briefs us on the current tactical situation. Today's threat level (the risk of NOD attacks) is low. The state of the planet is deteriorating. Tiberium infestation has reached critical levels. 

 

 

 

Uninhabitable - 30% of the world's surface has been designated as "red zones", which have suffered the worst contamination and can no longer sustain human life.   

 

 

Partially habitable - 50% of the surface has been designated as “yellow zones”. Decades of wars have left these regions into a state of social collapse. NOD is present here and has found many adepts to follow “the cause”. 

 

 

 

GDI Controlled - 20% - the remainder of the world surface - the “blue zones” has remained “unscared” by the tiberium infestation, and is now under the control of the Global Defense Initiative. 

 

 

I have to admit I had some doubts about the future of this great franchise when the ol' Westwood, the father of Real Time Strategy (remember Dune 2?) genre was bought by EA. After some good, yet a bit controversial new titles, like Command & Conquer: Generals and Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle Earth I and II, EA LA finally listened to the fans and gave them (and may I add - gave us all) something to be proud off.

Perfection - the interface is shaped for it: one thing that strategy fans always asked was a way to control the unit building queue without having to go back to the base and select buildings, being forced to abandon the “heat of the battle” momentarily. This is what hardcore C&C fans missed the most. Well it's back, and EA LA has managed to have the best of both world: a powerful interface and individual building queues per each structure. Control is now just one click away! {pagebreak}

I've seen recent comments claiming that graphics aren't good enough, and they seem a bit old. Really? I found C&C3 to “wear” one of the best graphics, and the physics are just superb. Sure, it's based on the old Generals engine (it's called SAGE - if you thought to ask), but it has many improvements, and everything runs smooth. The game is visually pleasing on both low and high end machines, and the frame rate is high on both. Terrain varies a lot as well depending on the conflict zones. That's a lot, considering...

...You have roughly 40 single player missions (18 with GDI, 18 with NOD and 4 with Scrin respectively). You will command your troops and conquer your enemies in Africa, Australia, Western and Eastern Europe and North America. You can also experience the game in multiplayer mode - over 25 varied maps (Kane edition) and more to come (EA also promised a map editor soon - we shall see...); but let's focus on singleplayer a bit.

A rewarding singleplayer campaign

I will be honest with you: I am the most devoted Command and Conquer fan. I grew up on Command and Conquer and Red Alert, and this third game of the series manages to recreate some of those feelings from since I was little. It was the coolest thing to be able to command an army in real time, and to outthink your enemies with some fancy strategy.

Plus, C&C always had some sort of realism to it, remember the tanks and how the recoil worked when they were throwing projectiles? Not to mention the excellent music and that EVA AI voice we all love.
But I think there is also one important thing that makes C&C special. It always had real FMVs. All the cinematics featured real actors and you were a part of the big picture. I've been thinking why many games never got that. Well for once in the early years it was mostly because of the technology and the resources you needed to play such a game; and now... now no one bothers to use real actors - you can easily tell the story with the in-game engine, or with pre-rendered movies. {pagebreak}

Not Command and Conquer. Uhhh unnn! A good part of the feeling of the game comes from the realistic movies. It seems like EA paid attention to the fans again and gathered some of the best stars:

 

 

 

 

Josh Holloway from Lost and Tricia Helfer from Battlestar Galactica appear along with now legendary Joseph D. Kucan (Kane) if you play the NOD side; 

...while Michael Ironside from Top Gun and Starship Troopers, Billy Dee Williams from Star Wars, Grace Park from Battlestar Galactica and the beautiful Jennifer Morrison from House help you command and conquer with GDI.

 

 

 

 

 

The movie clips also feature CNN News Reporter Shanon Cook, Las Vegas Fox News anchor John Huck - both real-life reporters, and Shauntay Hinton (Miss USA) who also plays as a reporter.

 

 

 

 

 

Then there are the missions - a lot of them, and really varied. As I've said before, you get to play all over the world. It's too bad that it doesn't have those commando missions - you know, inside enemy buildings from Red Alert for example... But that's just wishful thinking, it has pretty much everything else in rest. The game has 3 difficulty levels, that can be selected when you start it. You gain medals for completing a mission on a specific difficulty setting: bronze, silver and gold for easy, medium and hard respectively. You also gain awards and medals for completing all the bonus objectives (yes, there are some optional ones), or for gathering all the intelligence information about you or your enemy units, and so on...

I'm such a big Sci-Fi fan, and the story is just good and it keeps you alert and wanting to play the next mission and the next and the next, just to see what happens. {pagebreak}

Combined with good MultiPlayer

I will let you discover more of the singleplayer details, and talk about multiplayer. Apparently, when talking about multiplayer and balance, a lot of people talk about “rock, paper, scissors”, maybe because it's an easy to understand the comparison for everyone. But I really find it more appropriate to compare it to chess, because it involves some complexity after all. Oh well, I guess it's because not so may people know chess... So - the “rock, paper, scissors” part of the game: So far, it obeys the same rules from previous C&C games:

 

GDI is a modern army with money and technology available, and it has more “universal” units, making it easy to play for a beginner. That by no means signifies that the other 2 factions are more powerful, or - for what it matters - any less.

 

 

 

NOD has what it does best: stealth, camouflage and subtlety. NOD units may not so powerful or resilient as GDI ones, but they are cheaper and can perform better if the right mixture of units is picked. I forgot to tell you, but in C&C 3 you have to combine unit types as there isn't one really good that does all. Except maybe the mammoth tank from GDI, but even that has limitations: it's slow and not cheap to build.

 

 

The Scrin are a new addition to the C&C universe. The aliens that are avid for tiberium were awake by a blast of liquid tiberium deposit. Everything Scrin is based on the precious mineral: buildings and units. The Scrin excel in numbers and infantry, and have low cost units. Their air units also do wonders, but they lack the “surgical precision” high-tech NOD and GDI aircraft have. 

 

Multiplayer maps are balanced and they are cleverly made so that the player has to go out of the base, expand and take control of more resources, and not “turtle up”, because the resources are limited. The skirmish AI is decent, and it has along the standard 3 difficulty levels different “personality settings”:

Balanced - the default setting
Rusher - builds as many low level units as fast as possible and tries to catch you off-guard at the beginning
Turtle - barricades itself into the base with a really strong defense
Guerrilla - attempts to use guerrilla tactics against you like sabotage or capture buildings
Steamroller - builds as many tanks as possible as fast as possible (also known as tank rush)

Multiplayer also supports online or local area play. {pagebreak}

Establishing battlefield control, standby...

There were some problems when the game was launched preventing some users to connect to online play, but four consecutive patches were out to address most of the problems users had.

EA also promised C&C fans that they will implement the “singleclick interface” that was in the previous C&C games in the first major patch. You know, the one where you clicked and the units moved, and if you clicked on a target they will attack, or well... adapt to the situation... Can hardly wait... 

If I were to draw a conclusion, I can say this game brings me back my memories from when I was a kid, and shows us all what real time strategy should be like, in a world so imperfect and full of MMOs... God, I miss the old days sometimes...

Gameplay: 91
Fantastic. Dynamic. Spectacular. And it's good too... The gameplay is alert, tactics are varied and determined by the great variety of units and abilities available to the player. A lot of singleplayer and multiplayer content, with real HD cinematics that make a good Sci-Fi story with some present day subtle metaphors added for the ones who catch them...

Graphics: 88
Still built on SAGE engine, but the game looks good, and those heat effects, buildings, and animations are a dream come true. Infantry squads have independent animations, and you can even see the buildings reflect in water on the streets when it's raining...

Multiplayer: 89
Same as singleplayer: brings the already known Command and Conquer dynamism to the RTS world. Interface helps a lot, allowing you to do the strategies you imagine, instead of forcing you to change them in order to make them work.

Sound: 90
Excellent sound effects, and with the EVA AI assisting you, you really feel that you are commanding your troops from far away. Music helps setting the mood too, and it's similar to previous C&C titles (techno and rock).

Hardware: 90
I have actually tried this game on a few systems, and I am impressed. It works like a charm even on an old FX 5700, and you don't loose much of the “eye candy” either.