You might think that the folks behind Command & Conquer would want to make the final chapter in the series' main storyline an homage to past games, a tribute to all of the things that fans love and have become familiar with over the years.
You'd be wrong.
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight feels more like an experiment in which almost every element of the series' classic design has been scrapped and replaced with something new. Aside from those campy live action cut scenes for which the franchise is famous, it hardly even feels like a Command & Conquer game.
Here's the biggest change: No more base building or resource gathering. It's no longer about constructing giant armies with which to swarm over your opposition, but rather producing and maintaining a small force via a powerful mobile "crawler" platform and roaming the map to complete a series of objectives, including destroying, capturing, protecting, and escorting various targets.
The main strategy comes in selecting which class of crawler to use. Choices include offence, defense, and support, and each comes with its own selection of units. This sounds like a neat idea, but in most cases I found success simply by sticking with either offence or support so that I had a good range of movement and could quickly hammer my enemies. And with so few units on the battlefield at any given time (usually no more than a dozen), my group tactics were limited to repeatedly manufacturing units that would be most effective against the sort of enemies I was currently facing.
One change I do like is the addition of an RPG-like leveling system. Players earn experience and achievements with almost every action they take, and as they go up in rank they unlock more powerful units and better upgrades that can be applied to specific units. It takes a bit too long to begin earning really powerful units, but it's a good motivator to keep playing. What's more, the leveling system extends to all modes; a smart move, since the campaign is so short that you probably won't get to the best stuff before you finish.
On the subject of the campaign, we can play from the perspective of either the Global Defence Initiative or the Brotherhood of Nod (we rank up separately in each faction). However, playing through both campaigns won't take avid players more than a weekend. You can extend the experience a bit by playing again co-operatively with a friend, but all that does is make it easier to get through missions more quickly.
That means long-term value will come from competitive play, which has players trying to capture and hold control points. Teams can have as many as five players, each with their own little army working their own little chunk of turf.
I liked multiplayer more than the campaign, but not at first. In early matches I simply picked a control point, hauled in a defensive crawler and hunkered down to protect it. I didn't have much fun. It's bad strategy (even the best defenses can be overwhelmed by concerted effort from a couple of enemy crawlers and armies), and, worse, it's boring.
I began enjoying myself a lot more when I started treating it like a game of Battlefield, capturing one control point after another, going in search of the action rather than staying put. Helping out a besieged teammate feels great, and seeing a group of friendlies swarm in when you're on your last unit and enemies are pounding your crawler feels even better.
However, I only enjoyed the larger games, the ones with four or five players on each side. Smaller two-and four-player games typically lack drama and surprise, and the maps sometimes seem to echo with emptiness.
Last thing: Given the recent discussions that have taken place on this blog about restrictive DRM systems, it's worth noting that Command & Conquer 4 uses the same DRM found in some recent Ubisoft games, including Assassin's Creed II. Regardless of whether you're playing solo or with others, you need to sign in to your EA account and maintain a connection with the company's servers in order to play.
Obviously, this limitation means Command & Conquer 4 won't be ideal for a wide variety of people, including frequent fliers who like to pass their airborne hours with a little interactive strategy, folks in hotel rooms who don't want to pay outrageous connection fees, and those with sometimes spotty connections at home.
Suffice to say that this game is behind me. I had some fun with multiplayer, but I'm heading back to the more welcoming and highly engrossing pastures of Napoleon: Total War. I've been having a great time with this smart, complex, and -dare I say?-educational PC strategy game over the past couple of weeks. I'll share my thoughts about it in a future post.
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
Platform: Windows PC
Developer: EA Los Angeles
Publisher: EA
ESRB: Teen
Score: 2.5/4
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