A Click Away From: Command and Conquer 4

Hello Commander. The Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight Beta has been activated and your assignment is to see how the final instalment to the Tiberium Universe is shaping up.

We may only have access to competitive match making with this build of the game but there’s more than enough on show to see that C&C4 is radically different from past iterations.

For those not following development progress; Tiberian Twilight takes a hybrid strategy/role playing approach to gameplay. The basic profile stats system that tallied wins and losses from previous titles has been expanded to give your commander profile a whole online persona. Play well and win to receive experience which goes towards unlocking different branches of the tech tree for use ingame. Units, upgrades and abilities span three stratagems, offense, defence and support, which you select at the beginning of each map for the duration of the game. In many ways this resembles the old generals power/command points system from previous games albeit now in a persistent form and lacking a lot of the interesting abilities. Functionally the system works fine, but it does run the risk of oversimplifying the gameplay. Tactical flexibilities aren’t modifiable on the fly when you’re tied to a specific set of units that only serve singular purposes as soon as you begin the map. And each new unit ultimately does nothing aside from being a more powerful replacement of an existing one and with a different skin.

Persistent levelling isn’t the only thing that’s new to Tiberian Twilight’s online battles. In fact there’s very little that you would actually recognise when you load up your first game. Command Centers are walking AT-ATs, tiberium harvesting is replaced with a capture-the-crystal-for-bonuses side quest, annihilation is gone in favour of a Company of Heroes style victory point/king of the hill mechanic and all of the units look like they belong in some Japanese robo anime. I’ve put a few levels into the offensive GDI tree and have yet to see a recognisable unit or one that doesn’t have annoying and soullessly spoken lines.

Perhaps that is the biggest sin Tiberian Twilight commits, it’s Command and Conquer in name only. We may not yet have glimpsed the single player campaign, but the online aspect of the game fails to provide the personality that drew many of us in to the older titles. Sure, the old green hue of tiberium tints the map and the tail of that tank shaped like a scorpion does look like a classic Nod prism tower (another monument to the stupid unit design), but this still feels nothing like Command and Conquer.

Don’t think that this beta doesn’t deserve some praise though. Functionally this is the best beta build of a title that I’ve ever played; it doesn’t crash or bug out, it loads quickly, it isn’t unstable and laggy, the menus are intuitive and easy to navigate and the matchmaking will always find you a game within 3 minutes. It really is quite easy to hop in for a quick death match. Surely these things are a very good sign for the quality of the final release. Unfortunately, the problems I’ve found are ones less likely to change in time for going gold, unlike the bugs and errors that the developers will iron out. The problem lies in the bland, repetitive and dull gameplay that has no personality to draw you back in, with the only aim of the game being control point capture, a single structure to create units from and no resource system aside from ‘build stuff until your population cap hits’  the rounds almost always play out the same way. You spam a mixture of your rock, paper and scissors. Your foe spams their mixture of rock, paper and scissors. You duke it out for an hour whilst trying to get one up on each other with control point domination. It’s all so lack lustre that I’d be suprised if many people don’t give up on it after only a couple of matches. As such it also fits the criteria for most disappointing beta I’ve ever played too. It’s nothing more than a poor attempt at a hybrid RTS. And it’s certainly not Command and Conquer.

Posted by D Kennedy
Categories: Gaming