In Review: COMMAND & CONQUER 3: TIBERIUM WARS

By Dom Mukwamba-Sendall

I’ve looked forward to this game for ages and now I’m disappointed. If this game had been released four years ago it would be hailed as one of the best RTS in history, it would have received plaudits from the most resonant of it’s critics and I would’ve been absolutely chevved.

Unfortunately it has been released in the wake of titles like Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes, titles in which victory cannot be assured by simply building enough tanks to overwhelm opposition, where flanking units makes a difference and where effective full frontal assaults on enemy positions are as rare as sparrows teeth.

C&C as a series has never really been about tactical play. Base building always seemed more like preamble to a brainless yet colourful assault on enemy emplacements, in this respect C&C3 doesn’t disappoint. The same satisfaction arises from building as many tanks as Tiberium will allow and marching them right through the enemy’s front gate while humming Ride of the Valkyries and watching your isometric minions rain pain as ever. In a nod (get it) to Command and Conquer Generals you now have your arsenal of tech powers displayed on the left of the screen, so if your melee goes tits up you’re ecosystem altering A-bomb or ever so pretty Ion cannon is only one flippant click away. You also get the handy option of setting individual units to stances like hold fire or to guard specific targets such as your projectile magnet of a harvester, which I might add is still just as thick as always.

As soon as your base runs out of Tiberium the damn thing just ups and leaves dragging its guards off to get blown to smithereens in the nearest enemy controlled Tiberium patch. Which is in essence C&C3’s problem, they’ve stuck rigidly to the original template. EA have battalions of game testers who’s role is to raise these problems, problems which players of the series have raised time and time again; why is the enemy A.I. only capable of churning out wave after wave of resistance? Why is positioning a building such a tedious and time-consuming affair that often draws attention from some critical skirmish on the other side of the map? Why do units left to their own devices choose to follow enemies out of their own territory to be blown to oblivion before you even notice? And why in shitting crikey do orcas once they’ve destroyed a target not return to base, choosing instead to hover above A.A. guns that dutifully blow them to pieces?

Command and Conquer seems in a perpetual transitional period, playing like an arcade game but not wanting to relinquish its real time strategy roots. The sooner EA realise they may never be competent enough to develop a strategy heavy RTS in house, embrace the most enjoyable aspects of C&C, the wanton destruction and discard or repair the obsolete leftovers the better.