If you’ve been missing Command & Conquer—and no, I don’t mean 2003’s Blizzard-genuflecting Generals—Command & Conquer 3 is like time traveling back to when wild-eyed actors straddled cheesy green-screen sets and gave you what for about saving or flat out trashing the planet. It resurrects all the stuff real-time strategy disciples cut their teeth on so many years ago like single resource economies, full-motion video, lunatic super weapons, and C&C’s beloved if obfuscating trademark right-hand sidebar. Call it derivative if you like, you might as well be paying it a compliment.
Vici This
Like its predecessors, Tiberium Wars is first and foremost an action RTS, meaning it’s aimed at gamers who’d rather play destruction derby with posses of super-powered soldiers, tanks, and sci-fi gizmos than stoically ponder the fate of trundling battalions from on high. Its view fixes down in the trenches, locked just above the heads and hulls of your toy armies like a movie set cam that pans and pivots as an extension of the overall management mechanic. Figuring out where to snap that tactical view when the flak hits the fan at discrete flashpoints is part of the thrill, and you shouldn’t confuse C&C’s tactics-lite MO with an epically strategic RTS like Supreme Commander. That’d be like mixing up The Sims and Sim City.
So if you’re not turned off by a formula that hasn’t changed much since Westwood’s Dune II, Tiberium Wars delivers the consummate C&C experience gilded with all the series’ trademark production bling. As in all the Tiberian-series games, you mine a single resource called Tiberium. It’s as simple as positioning a refinery and keeping half an eye on the harvester that automatically rolls out to farm gradually self-replenishing fields of green crystal. Minor design issue: if those fields run dry, your harvesters automatically go a-huntin’ for more, whether you want them dumbly poking into enemy territory or not. EA claims it’s the better tradeoff next to idling in place, but why not make it a behavioral option?
Located in strategic patches you’ll vie for on each map, Tiberium funds your structures, units, and a few unit performance upgrades. Building basic structures leads to more powerful ones and enables special abilities in classic this-unlocks-that fashion. You’ll also have to allocate power to your structures by building power plants—tip into the red and half your base can flatline, another classic C&C convention that’s just the right amount of “hassle” for this scale. Buildings themselves are still a two-click affair (one to build, a second to place), and the old one-at-a-time queue system forces you to prioritize structures, vehicles, and infantry strategically instead of just spitting stuff out en masse. That all this still feels novel a decade later is remarkable, and testament to the genius of Westwood’s original design.
Three Way
Want C&C’s classic brawny chest-thumping faction? The Global Defense Initiative fills its old shoes nicely, replete with classic shoot-bomb-snipe infantry teams, super-armored multi-gunned Mammoth tanks, mobile missile launchers, and a powerful two-legged mech called the Juggernaut that’s like a walking long-range cannon. If you’re all about building simple and rushing hard, GDI’s your nuts and bolts pick.
Cult-like and “stickin’-it-to-the-man,” the Brotherhood of Nod employs a range of sneakier units like saboteurs, stealth tanks, and speed-rush suicide bombers (“fanatics”) that if you let in too close can instantly wipe out entire squads of your best—tanks included—in seconds. Hit the high end and Nod gets something called an Avatar Warmech, a towering robot that can upgrade itself (stealth, defense, secondary beam weapons) by chomping on friendly vehicles. It’s weaker than GDI’s Mammoths but pays dividends if you need a highly dynamic support unit. Both sides gradually accrue special abilities tied to your structures and which work just like The Battle for Middle-earth 2’s “ring” powers. So where GDI gets stuff like the uber-nasty ion cannon, air strikes, and airborne units your can drop like Company of Heroes’ paratroopers, Nod gets surreptitious abilities like shadow strike teams (glider assassins), cloaking fields, and (okay—not so surreptitious) blast-em-to-hell nukes.
New to the series, the Scrin are the long hinted-at alien third faction that integrates ably balance-wise as a sort of GDI/Nod hybrid, combining power and stealth and organized tactically around a more special-ability driven approach. For instance, combining swarms of flying razors called “buzzers” with other Scrin units improves their defensive capabilities, and the Scrin can spread Tiberium around, slowly enervating approaching infantry. Their Wormhole power lets you instantly warp any two units around the map, and Rift actually rips open a miniature black hole that slurps down anything in the vicinity. While the Scrin start off the weakest and susceptible to early rushing, they counter with the most powerful high-end arsenal, like a planetary assault carrier that spits out squads of fighters and motherships that pulls off ID4-style one-shot building kills. Were they necessary after GDI and Nod? Not really. But unique and well-balanced? Unquestionably.
Tiberium Rex
You get two campaigns for the game’s solo story mode and a brief four-mission coda for the Scrin that in one of the game’s few missteps feels too much like an afterthought. GDI’s missions tick by quickly, cluttered with tutorials and easy, small-fry maps with two or three genuinely difficult missions. Fortunately Nod’s are worth the price of the game alone, considerably more tense than GDI’s and packed with frantic, frequently timer-driven objectives that force you to employ every last piece of Nod’s stealth arsenal.
If you’d rather skirmish, Tiberium Wars lets you set A.I. skills levels as well as tweak personality settings like “rusher” or “turtle.” It still won’t beat playing with up to eight players online (unranked, ranked, or clan-based laddering) if you’re after spontaneity, but it’s nice to see an A.I. finally getting the options treatment instead of one-size-fits-all.
Of course it wouldn’t be a C&C without the flashy FMV (there’s an acronym I haven’t used in forever), and it certainly helps that EA went for broke by employing folks like Trica Helfer and Grace Park (Battlestar Galactica), Josh Holloway (Lost), and Michael Ironside (the voice of Sam Fisher in the Splinter Cell games). And FMV never looked better, as in plenty of DVDs play half as crisp. Sure, the story’s on par with something you’d throw rice at in a theater, but that’s what this series is all about, after all: one crazy, explosive, silly, gorgeous, over-the-top moment after another.
Article by: Matt Peckham
Video produced by: Michael Benson
