Game Reviews

Electronic Arts has given over the Command & Conquer franchise to an always-online, MMO scheme of leveling up to unlock content, which can work in a shooter, a role-playing game, or Scientology. But it's a fundamental misreading of the appeal of real-time strategy games. The basis for an RTS is that you have a box of different toys. Each game, you choose different toys. Do you go with tanks? Infantry? Aircraft? Your choice, pitted against the other player's choice, determines how the game unfolds.

But when you start Command & Conquer 4, your choices are limited to about a fifth of the actual content. Leveling up is a slow laborious process. Expect to spend several hours fingering listlessly through the meager baseline stuff. Vanilla tank. Vanilla rocket buggy. Vanilla anti-tank soldier. Skirmishes against the A.I. and online games can inch you along that bar to the next level. The campaign is a big, fat, uninteresting experience point farm, and you're expected to play through it twice, once for each faction. You get the usual scripted guff, which is particularly frustrating when you have to play the more difficult missions at the mercy of A.I. teammates or -- even worse -- a timer. The story throws over the series' usual, B-level celebrity camp in favor of something earnest, but it doesn't work any better. It's clearly digging deep into its source material, so it's not going to make a lot of sense to folks who haven't kept up on the lore. Me, for instance. At one point, Kane says something along the lines of "when I found you people thousands of years ago, you were living in mud huts". Aside from having no idea what he was going on about, he really doesn't look that old. As near as I could tell, the story was about a one-of-a-kind Lasik procedure and some unlikely cosmetic surgery. Go figure. But, hey, what a lot of units, and upgrades, and support powers! But as you discover them, you'll get the sinking feeling that the gameplay has been compromised so as to draw out the content over 40 levels worth of unlocks. For a game built to appeal to the basic gamer instinct of unlocking stuff, it does a terrible job. Yeah, sure, I can see that I'm going to get some sort of tank called a Widow when I hit 16th level, but it might help to know why I should care. Everything is poorly explained and much of it reeks of filler.