Format: Windows | Developer: EA Games | Publisher: EA Games | Genre: Strategy | Released: 26 March 2007

Let me get this out of the way. I hate Electronic Arts. No, I loathe Electronic Arts. I hate their business practice. I hate their lousy support. And I specially hate all the game companies (and franchises) they bought and destroyed. When they came out with Command & Conquer: Generals, it pretty much joined the group. So, when they announced Command & Conquer 3, I had no hopes for it. Even when the first gameplay screenshots and videos came out, I still had no hope for it. I wouldn't believe it. Couldn't believe it. Never would believe that Electronic Arts would make it live up to the series' reputation.

I was proven wrong. It's like a Command & Conquer fan threatened them with seriously unstoppable horrible acts if they didn't do the game justice. Sounds like my kind of guy.

Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars is... well, it's not the third Command & Conquer game. All things considered, it's more or less the eigth Command & Conquer game. Instead, it's the third of the Tiberian series / storyline. The whole name screams of cheap anyways. "It's got Tiberium and it's got Wars, let's call it Tiberium Wars!". So let's not talk about that.

For those familiar with the series, well... frankly, all you need to know is this. The game is good. Really good. Command & Conquer good. Why are you reading this? You don't need to read this. Go out and get the game and it'll tell you much more than I could. But for those new to the series, I'll explain it all. So, a meteor hit Earth back in the first game, spreading this odd organic substance called Tiberium. It was dangerous yet it was valuable. So war ensued. A lot. So let's fast-forward to 2047.

Tiberium has now spread to critical levels. The substance pretty much turns anything it touches into more Tiberium and nobody really bothered to stop it, so it slowly spread throughout the planet, leaving it in a devastated state. Earth is now split into three types of areas: Red Zones, uninhabitable and chaotic due to the full-fledged Tiberium infestation that's causing ion storms and other ecological disasters. Yellow Zones, also infested by Tiberium, which leads to dangerous living conditions, which leads to civil unrest, which leads to a not very nice place to live. So of course these cover half the planet. Finally, there's the few Blue Zones (why not green? Oh right, Tiberium is green) which are safe and unharmed due to recently developed anti-Tiberium technology.

The Global Defense Initiative (GDI) upkeep the Blue Zones, since they're the technologically-advanced humanity-protecting side that came up with said technology. To oppose them, there's the Brotherhood of Nod, lead by menacingly-bald Kane, that think Tiberium are the next step in evolution and bring the New World Order. Clearly they're nutcases, so they thrive off the vulnerable Yellow Zones to recruit their forces. And after years of hiding, they finally come out and strike hard against GDI, and all hell breaks loose. And that's called the Third Tiberium War. Of course, to add a spin to things, there's also a new third side, the Scrin, alien race which comes up in the middle of the mess. But I'm not gonna spoil the whole story for you.

MAMMOTH RUSH!

Well ok, it's not the most original thing in the book. I agree. But they pull it off lovely. Heck, the whole game looks lovely. Because if there's one thing that you gotta enjoy about war games, it's the WOOSH ZING KAPOW feel to them. All the explosions going, infantry flying through the air, bullets from the left, missiles from the right, lasers from the middle... it gives you that same giddy feeling when you were a kid playing with war toys. It looks beautiful and Tiberium Wars manages it all without being a resource hog about it. Even all the menus and screens are all nicely animated and really fit in with the hi-tech atmosphere of the game. The sound and music are also top notch. There's pretty much music in every part of the game, leaving no moment of silence, and always changing based on the situation. All the units have charming and sometimes clever voiceovers, giving them a touch of personality, and everything sounds like it should, from a nuclear explosion to tiberium growing.

I'm so evil, not even my hair can stand me!

To add to that, the game's story is all reported to you in pre-rendered FMVs. FMVs are a lovely art that game developers seem to have dumped for 3D rendered scenes, which I think it's a shame, because nothing beats flesh and blood actors. Plus they're pre-rendered so no performance issues, and the last thing you want is people stuttering your objectives. Aside from Joe Kucan playing Kane once again, Electronic Arts went all out in making the rest of the cast popular and familiar. You'll find Tricia Helfer, Josh Holloway, Michael Ironside, Jennifer Morrison, Billy Dee Williams... heck, you'll be wondering if you got lost and ended up in a movie theatre. They'll be reporting all you need to know and keep the storyline moving as the world seemingly falls apart, casting their roles flawlessly.

The missions play out pretty linearly. You'll get to play from either of the sides, and they each have their own set of missions, but they all revolve around the same story. So it's kinda like playing the same thing three times, but each time you'll find out what the other side's intents were, and eventually figure out the whole story as you play along, which is a nice touch. The missions will slowly pop up on a world map as you move through, and sometimes you might get more than one mission at once, but the order you beat them in is irrelevant since you still have to beat them all to move on. However, the missions themselves can vary a lot. You might have a whole base at your disposal or just a small army, having to rely on abandoned buildings, or even have to infiltrate an entire base with a lone commando. The missions will have various primary objectives clearly displayed to you, some showing up after others. But to add to the spin, there's also secondary objectives you can complete which might be revealed immediatly, as the mission progresses or through exploring the map, and they can range from trivial to "rubbing salt on the wound". There's also various events that are triggered in-game as you progress along, but they're often triggered in very specific ways, so you can easily work your way around them. You'll also collect intelligence along the way, just background info on the story and the units. This might seem pretty irrelevant, but you do get awarded based on how much you find and complete on each mission, so if you're the kind that just has to beat games 100% just to look at all those shiny medals, be on the look out. The game also lets you replay any unlocked missions any time you want to ease this. Well, not that there's anything easy about beating every mission in Hard difficulty with all the extra stuff.

Nod kicking alien ass.

As for the game itself... well, unlike Command & Conquer: Generals, this one actually follows up on its predecessors, with the return of lots of familiar elements, and even references to previous games. The series has always been designed as a fast-paced RTS, and Tiberium Wars follows on. You build up a base, gather tiberium for credits, and spend them on troops to kick your opponent's ass. Yes, yes, you're funded by Earth's biggest threat, I get it. The game is kept simple and nice since every building either unlocks stuff or produces stuff, and to prevent over-expansion they all demand power so you need to keep those plants in check, and every unit's capabilities are obvious, so you'll quickly get a grasp of what does what and why. And there's plenty of informative tooltips to remind you and let you know if you can actually afford or power it. As for the units, they range from infantry, vehicles and aircraft, all wielding either machine guns, rocket launchers, cannons, railguns and other crazy sci-fi weaponry, as well as the classic capture-all engineer and gather-all harvester. Every unit has their strengths and weaknesses, and Electronic Arts saw it fit to also add unit abilities and upgrades to the spin. There's also the good old superweapons, buildings with chargeable weapons that cause major unstoppable havoc if nobody destroys them, as well as new superunits, the most powerful and expensive units but, once taken down, their remains are left for any other player to recapture for themselves. Risky business. Well, most of the time it turns battles into "hot potato".

Now boys, play nice.

The maps take you across all the zones, although they all seem to have a desolate atmosphere. Oh, and brown. Quite brown. It's certainly not a very colorful game, I can tell you that. Mission maps will often be designed and shaped to force you to go against and/or circumvent various obstacles, just so you can't take the easy path and often curse at the game for it, such as hills you can't get across without air support, or pits you can't go around without fixing the conviently broken bridge. They're also filled with various buildings to aid you or even turn the tide of the battle, such as standard civilian buildings you can stick your troops in for additional cover, or captureable tech buildings that'll give you extra weapons, tiberium, or even Subways to quickly get your troops spread around the map. And finally, there are the random crates with random benefits, from credits to ranks. You'll also have plenty of tiberium around, usually more than enough to keep you away from the traditional "There's no more money!" problem, specially since tiberium grows overtime (no, I don't know how crystals can grow either). In fact, the red zones are the richer ones, so ironically you'll have a much easier time in those since you'll have way more tiberium than you can handle, thus why these maps are loathed by players because of the unhindered building (aka RUSH RUSH RUSH). To make matters worse, Electronic Arts decided to go back to the traditional method of having to build silos to store the tiberium (which even Westwood eventually got rid of), and no matter how fast or how much you build, you will eventually get the annoying "Silos needed" message.

The interface pretty much consists of the ever-present ever-vigilant sidebar, from which you have all your construction options split into categorized tabs: buildings, support structures, infantry, vehicles and aircraft. One flaw that the sidebar had was that it didn't allow for a separate unit queue per building, something present in every recent RTS. Electronic Arts addressed this by adding sub-tabs for each building, thus keeping the interface's swiftness. They also added a new tab to manage unit selections, especially for the addition of the new unit abilities and upgrades, since you can no longer do everything from the mouse cursor. Speaking of which, a bit of an odd change is that, while every other Command & Conquer game relied on the "left-click order, right-click cancel" method, Electronic Arts decided to swap these around, possibly to match with modern RTS. But this becomes terribly confusing because, while unit orders use this method, unit abilities and other such still use the old method, so you'll quickly get them mixed and do the wrong thing. And there's no option to change this, another odd thing since Electronic Arts went to the trouble of adding a whole Hotkeys screen just so users could customize hotkeys for every single button on the screen. Or even those not on the screen. You'll also have advanced unit commands and stances for the micromanager inside you, including the "holy crap why didn't anyone think of this before" Reverse Move, which... well, makes your units move backwards. It sounds stupid, but we all know how units tend to take forever and get all mixed up when turning around. There's also Formation Preview, the only order that gets its own stat: "Number of times Formation Preview used". Seriously. It allows you to quickly lay out an entire unit selection at once instead of carefully positioning them individually. Although it only allows you to spread out or pack together your unit selection, in a "stronger units at front, weaker units at back" fashion. Personally, I would've preferred it the other way around. I don't want my most valuable units being the ones to get killed off first.

Standard-issue GDI Base

Finally, the AI can really be tough when it wants to. Not that it's particularly ingenious. It just knows how to keep on making your life difficult. Raise the difficulty and you'll quickly find it attacking you from every available side with every available weapon at its disposal. And it won't rest until it's wiped you off the face of the Earth. But you simply can't feel threatened about an AI that will happily order infantry squads to run through a tiberium field and get them all killed. Of course, the same goes for your units if you don't keep an eye on them. Your units may not find their way around a hill and get stranded somewhere. Your harvester will still head into imminent doom if there's tiberium in it. But at least the AI knows better than to just keep on using the same tactics and attacking the same things, so you'll have to stay on your toes, specially if you push the difficulty all the way up to Brutal. You can also pick from various strategies for the AI to use in multiplayer games if his current one gets old.

Speaking of multiplayer, that's the one part of the game that Electronic Arts has gone to great extents to make it a brand new enjoyable experience. Which also means it's the feature most likely to break, but more on that later. Most games will just slap on an online lobby and you're done! Tiberium Wars has built-in support for clans, rankings, replays, VoIP, stats for both online and offline games, and... get this, BattleCast. What is this thing called BattleCast, you ask? Well, someone thought "Hey, what if we turned our online lobbies into an online sport?!?". Any BattleCasts are automatically broadcasted for anyone to watch and even add commentary, live! "Imsocool456 is coming in rolling with mammoths right out of nowhere, he's aiming at Omfglawks123, he seems unstoppable! But wait, what's this, ladies and gentlemen? In all my years of BattleCast Commentator, I have never seen something like this. Omfglawks123 has moved in with a counterdefensive air force and completely outflanked Imsocool456. This is outstanding!". Players can just go to the BattleCast section of the official website to join any ongoing battles, although currently you'll need the full game to watch them, but Electronic Arts is making a BattleCast viewer so that anyone can watch in the future. Even after the battle, all BattleCasts are archived and thus can still be watched at any time, as well as adding commentary.

But of course, nothing is ever as good as it seems. As on par with the lovely shlovely EA Support, the game has its fair share of bugs, crashes and multiplayer issues, from things like FMV audio/video being out of sync to crashes with error messages such as "Fatal exception in exception handler". And, you know, if the handler can't handle the handling, all hell breaks loose. However, Electronic Arts has already released four patches at the time of this review to address these issues, with a fifth one under development. They also released a World Builder (map editor), which is nice. And, from my experience with EA Support, it's bit of a mixed case. I contacted EA Portugal about the fact that my account name both existed and didn't exist, and they only contacted me weeks later to direct me to EA International, which took forever to find. However, EA International fixed (well, explained) my problem in a few hours, mentioning that they have a deal with AOL to automatically reserve any EA accounts for the respective AIM accounts. Even if, you know, nobody ends up using them. So, yeah, I dunno what to say. Well frankly, I've said enough, so I'll conclude with this:

WHOOSH!

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