Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight Preview

The grandaddy of RTS franchises is back, but this time there are changes.

Red Alert 3 was a great game, but innovation was hardly one of its major strengths. On the contrary, it was a release that almost seemed to revel in the most familiar elements of its ancestral series: camp acting, a gloriously silly plot, and a massive selection of over-the-top war machines. Under the circumstances, it would be natural to assume that Command and Conquer 4 would follow a similar trajectory.

As it turns out, this isn’t the case. While C&C4 is certainly packed with all its most recognisable assets - Tiberium crystals, massive tanks and a certain bald-headed ultra-bastard - it’s also evident that EA has been keen to shake things up a little. Nod and The GDI are still the two playable factions, but now you must choose one of three command styles - sub-factions in all but name. Only one of these options will allow you to build structures, so the days of massive bases are all but gone. Generals now deploy all their vehicles from something called a Crawler, a mobile HQ-cum-War Factory, and you’re only allowed one at any time. And perhaps most controversially of all, this vital tool will respawn if it happens to get destroyed.

Remember the old days, where you’d send wave after wave of tanks at a base in a desperate bid to crush your mate’s Command Centre? Well, kiss ‘em goodbye. If your Crawler bites the dust then a new one will drop from the heavens, crushing any enemy troops beneath them. A few seconds later the dust will clear and you’ll be able to start pumping out tanks again. Depending on the difficulty level you’ll have a set number of respawns, so if you’re really rubbish it will certainly possible to lose. All the same, this can only be seen as a massive departure to everything that’s come before.

The turnaround from EA is all the more surprising given that this is officially the last entry in the Tiberium Wars series, a franchise that began with the genre-defining original C&C back in 1995. It’s always unexpected when a developer makes big changes to a long-established brand, but to do this to Command and Conquer? In the final chapter of the story? Why, surely even Kane himself would balk at such audacity?

But on second thoughts, perhaps this was exactly what the series needed. EA has openly admitted that their hand has been forced by success of games like Company of Heroes and Dawn of War II. Blizzard may be in a position where it’s happy and content to stick to its old-school format, but everyone else has to move with the times. It’s taken a long time for the RTS genre to really start changing, but now that the ball is rolling there’s a strong argument that developers must survive or die.