Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

This game was doomed from the start. Still, if you were lead designer on a sequel to a game which helped birth the RTS genre, what would you do? There's absolutely no chance of meeting expectations, and the franchise is already notorious for trading on nostalgia. So do you bow your head, accept defeat and make another clone? Or do you try out the most batshit crazy ideas you've had stashed away in your designer chest, and tailor them to GDI and NOD?

That's not the only problem they've had to overcome. EALA's public view is that Starcraft 2 is good for everyone involved in RTS, and it might be right. If (when) SC2 sells its pants off to both hardcore and mainstream gamers, a new generation of strategists will emerge, and perhaps be interested in the genre's other offerings. But make no mistake, Activision Blizzard had a strategy of its own when they widened their beta the same month as C&C4 and SupCom 2's release. With most journalists given access, it was a coverage-poaching move that perhaps both other games will easily stomach sales-wise, but we'll never know the full effect on their communities. The marketing equivalent of eco harassment.

Tiberium Twilight presents a dark future wherein everyone has lost their humanity in some way. Emotionally and mentally - through extended times of war - and physically - through either injury or just proximity to the mysterious Tiberium substance. As a returning commander - kept alive with a variety of implants - you've lost more than most.

The opening scene shows Kane (whose in-game stubbornness with death matches his refusal to age in real life) approaching some sort of big, important council with a long-awaited method of containing Tiberium's chokehold on the planet. Thus, GDI and NOD work together against a terrorist splinter faction, led by former NOD loyalist Gideon.

EALA wanted TT to be darker, grittier, and more believable – instead of the intentionally cheesy and hilarious campiness of Red Alert. If you plan on playing though, you'll wish I hadn't told you that. Cutscene quality is much the same, meaning ignorance is bliss in C&C4. The curse of prior knowledge is the difference between laughing with them, and laughing at them. Funny bad, and just plain bad.

But none of that matters if the gameplay is solid, right? Well, enter the crazy.

Your MCV is now truly mobile, able to pack, unpack, and even create units on the move. Now called a Crawler, it doesn't need Tiberium, or any other resource to make units. Gone are the harvesters, as Crawlers pump out units willy nilly until you reach your population cap.

Tiberium crystals themselves now act as flags, spread throughout the map, that you capture to upgrade your tech. These flags are hotly contested in multiplayer, as the first to upgrade will be spamming free tier 2 units against tier 1.

There's no more Scrin (what the hell was that **** anyway?), and C&C's system of very hard counters remains in place. Light, medium, and heavy units fall faster to bullet, cannon, and laser fire, respectively. It's funny seeing infantry and little attack bikes hold their position against massive tanks, but militarily, the counter system works very well.



Last but not least is the new classes; your Crawler can be one of three. Offence is the master of quickly fielding an army of rough tanks and mechs. Defence can build structures, as well as the infantry to garrison them. And Support controls mainly air units, as well as using Tiberium crystals to trigger powers like earthquakes under your enemy's base.

C&C4 takes heavy inspiration from World in Conflict here. Multiplayer matches are geared towards 5v5, and with each player controlling different types of units, you're forced to work together to become greater than the sum of your parts. You won’t be doing much at all starting out though, as the game forces you to level up to unlock units, even in multiplayer. Your first match will allow you less units than you can count on one hand, rendering you thoroughly useless. Silly move, EALA. That's what singleplayer is for.

Speaking of which, not much has been learned since the C&C campaigns of yesteryear. It's all very “go here, do that”, with little imagination. To fit in with the new mobile Crawlers, missions are now more mobile as well, which usually translates into the more boring missions of guarding convoys and the like.

To build cheap tension, you're often put on a timer to complete your objectives - and judging by the 5-hour length of the campaign, so was the development team. There are a handful of missions that undo your work as soon as it's done - watching a missile smugly cruise towards a civilian transport you've spent 20 minutes saving, or fighting your way into a base and taking it over only to have all the buildings - booby-trapped - blow up in your face. It takes away any sense of achievement, right before dangling virtual “achievements” in front of you, complete with +50XP.

You are able to do any mission co-op though, and oddly, the chat screen to organise this is built directly into your menu screen. I made use of this to chat to several multiplayer challengers, and this might surprise you, but 100% of those canvassed were pleased with C&C4's online play.

Once I got over needing to level up (and realised it wasn't much of a 1v1 game) I embraced the 5v5 craziness and it was a blast. Counting all classes from both GDI and NOD, there are essentially 6 factions, all with their own plethora of inventive units. It's impossible to predict what tactics will emerge, and of course, impossible to predict what imbalances will emerge, too.

Most matches will see you capturing control nodes throughout the map which - when the majority is controlled - give you Victory Points. These, with the Tiberium crystals and other buildings such as respawning zones and artillery towers, give the game a hefty emphasis on map control. Trouble is, there are too many points of interest on each map for five players to maintain control of.

This means matches of C&C4 are ever-moving. Attackers move forward, and those on the backfoot move into the newly created space. Even the Defence class can't stick around for too long, as a mobile commander can cap three points in the time it takes a stationary commander to secure one.

There are some solid design principles at work, and I’m sure many players would've liked to explore them further. But due to not allowing mirror-matches (NOD vs NOD, GDI vs GDI), there's no point in exploring C&C4's fantastically emergent gameplay. Why practice a complicated NOD strategy with four friends when the other team could get NOD in a coin toss?

It's a simple decision which cancels out much of multiplayer's depth by not making it worth a player's time to go hardcore. In its current unmodded state, C&C4 will remain a casual affair.

And then, of course, there's the DRM. We have a bit of a double-standard, us gamers. No one chews out other DRM platforms for doing similar, but yes, C&C4 is one of those games that requires a constant online connection to play, even for singleplayer. I attended a BYOC LAN recently where the internet was existent, but less than ideal, and couldn't open up the game at all.

Even at home, my beefy quad-core actually hung during the patching process – and something tells me neither Chrome or OpenOffice were to blame. In fact, the simple act of typing your account details into the pre-game launcher was enough to make my CPU stop and take a breather.

It's a shame to see the developers almost backed into a corner by waves of hate emanating from C&C fans on their own forums. It's clear that change was needed, but as the designers have said, “sometimes the pendulum swings too far.”

Have C&C players have grown to expect sameness? How responsible is it to change the formula so radically in the last instalment of this most established of franchises? Would these ideas have fared better in a completely different game?

Having been hooked on C&C since the demo of the first game, I’m about as purist as you can get. I felt almost apologetic for enjoying the hell out of multiplayer. But given only 10-20% of real-time strategists make use of multiplayer, was it responsible to nail the online play while relaxing on the singleplayer?

It's a shame we can't give two ratings. Hell, it's a shame we can't give three, just to slam the DRM. Once embraced and understood, I actually enjoyed the multiplayer more than SupCom 2, RUSE, and yes, even the Starcraft 2 beta. But singleplayer was like a tour of the worst parts of strategy games in the '90s, and hardly a fitting end to the Tiberium saga. So I’m giving a number based on overall fun, keeping in mind a very small part of that “overall” was the campaign. Whatever your tastes, there's no shortage of RTS games at the moment, so choose well and enjoy.