Command & Conquer

Organised Chaos

Recommending Command and Conquer is a bit like recommending you go and see the latest big blockbuster movie at the cinema. C&C; has been out now for a couple of weeks and has already nipped up to number 2 in the unofficial Internet Top 100 game chart. Very few games have that initial appeal, but also very few games stay at or near the top 10 for very long. Whether C&C; will have staying power is a debatable question, but its initial impact is rather explosive. C&C; was hyped a lot, and its release date slipped a few times, but in my view it's been worth the wait.

If you've played Dune II you'll be very familiar with the control system used in C&C.; While C&C; might to some people be Dune III, it's rather more than that. For one, it's set a small time into the future rather than in the Dune world. For another the protagonists this time are the Global Defence Initiative (the good guys) and the Brotherhood of NOD (the bad guys). These two forces compete for control of the world, and the invaluable tiberium (which for Dune II fans equates rather similarly to spice).

Each side has as arsenal of weaponary at its desposal, most of which only becomes available as the scenarios progress. This means you can't play with the advanced stuff too early, and you get new units to learn the pros and cons of as the game develops. For each side, winning overall means winning about 15 scenarios, but the scenarios you get vary to an extent on how well you do in each mission, and the difficulty of the mission can depend on the success of a previous mission.

However, if you choose network play you are able to have every weapon buildable, right up to satellite beams (GDI) and nukes (NOD). This makes network play, with up to 4 players, a rather awesome experience, and probably the most fun part of C&C;, if you have the hardware available. While C&C; is still a challenging and enjoyable game playing through the missions, the immense satisfaction of hearing the guy sat opposite squealing as you nuke his construction centre is second to none. And as C&C; comes on 2 CDs, you can play a 2-player game on 2 PCs with just one purchase of the game - nice one Westwood!

The manual is as complete as you could probably want. It looks quite similar to the Dune II manual, but then I guess it would! Glossy and well presented, very much like the game as a whole. The intro sequence heightens your game expectations - short movie clips from different cable TV channels put you into the mood of the world the game is set in. The value of TV as a propoganda medium for both sides becomes clear quite early in the game, with NOD hell bent on turning world and UN opinion against the GDI.

Glitz

C&C; is very professionally put together. Between each mission is a superbly rendered cut sequence, featuring digitised actors and computer graphics the like of which I've not seen before on a game of this ilk. Simply breathtaking. Even the install sequence is to be marvelled at. That said, one of the beefs of C&C; is that after those spellbinding sequences the game uses only standard 320x200 VGA, and not SVGA. Having seen the Warcraft 2 alpha demo, the graphics in C&C; do look very chunky, but once you get used to it you begin to appreciate the finer touches in the animations.

The animations have clearly had a lot of thought, and a good deal of humour, injected into them. Idle infantry will do pressups and fiddle around. Tanks have turrets which rotate smoothly as they move and fire. Grenadiers lob grenades which blast hapless victims up into the air in a bloodied mess. Rockets fizz from launchers and bazookas. Flamethrowers set enemy infantry ablaze. The NOD obelisk of light frazzles all those who approach. Yet most impressively of all the NOD nuclear missile will destroy or cripple many buildings and vapourize just about any infantry in the same screen as the impact point.

The sound effects are as good as you could probably want. In addition to all the battle sounds, there's a rather unconventional "techno" style set of background music, which cycles through about a dozen tracks as you play. The game controls let you program the tracks, so if you like track 10 (I think that's the one that reminds me of the Terminator music) then you can simply cycle endlessly through that track.

Gameplay

The forces at your disposal will vary with time and the nature of the mission. Sometimes you get a base to work with to build new units, sometimes you get fixed units, sometimes you get reinforcements, and on the odd mission you have just one man (but boy, what a man the commando is!).

Usually you start with a mobile construction yard, which becomes the focus of your base. Once deployed you can build new building types, and from them you can make new units. The buildings you get depend on which side you're on, though in network play these rules seem to be relaxed a bit. To build you need cash; cash is tiberium, and can only be realised with a harvester and a refinery. In many C&C; missions getting a good tiberium supply is vital, and denying your opponent his supply can be a killer. Unlike Dune II's spice fields, tiberium fields regenerate (slowly), and this can cause missions to be much longer term affairs.

The combat is not necessarily realistic. This seems to be a gameplay decision by Westwood. Tanks are not very good, even at close quarters, against infantry who are lying down (well, they can squish them by driving over them, but tank shells don't do much damage). Bazookas don't do much harm against opposing infantry. The idea seems to be that certain vehicles/troops are good against certain others. This makes combat very interesting. If you want to soften up some enemy tanks then send in a squad of bazookas, but if you do watch out for enemy NOD flamers or GDI grenadiers.

The mini-battles which develop in C&C; do look and sound like real encounters. Gunfire, explosions, rockets, tanks firing, it's all there and while the graphics are a little chunky in VGA the overall look and feel is very good, in part because the figures are quite small in proportion to the view window.

Control in C&C; is very simple. To select a unit or building you just click on it. You can select as many units as you like to give orders to (not just 4 as in Warcraft) and this allows you to shift large armies very quickly. The forces in C&C; are numerically much larger than Warcraft, one of the features which leads to a more "battle-like" feeling to the game. You can see the status of an enemy unit by clicking on it, handy when you're selecting weak targets to nail.

Building is also simple. The one caveat is that you can only build one building or unit at a time. If you have multiple barracks (or Hands of NOD if you're NOD) you simply make units faster, and you can select which barracks the unit appears from. New buildings must be adjacent to an existing building, but you can get around this by building a cheap sandbag wall out from your base, plopping a building at the end of it, then selling up the sandbags. If you're sneaky you can put gun towers at the end of sandbag rows - the GDI advanced guard towers are particularly deadly.

The Old Chestnuts

The two commonest questions often asked of games like this are "does it cheat?" and "is the AI any good?". Well, the early rumours were that the game does not cheat, but that the opposition can start with a lot of cash resources to give it an "edge". From my experience, you can have a pile of cash (tiberium is in effect cash) without the tiberium silos to store it, but if you try to harvest and process more tiberium than you can store the game will insist you build more storage. Thus you can have 5000 cash with no storage, but if your harvester returns with a crop of tiberium it can't unload it. This means you can sell off buildings and have cash to repair/build units even if you have no storage, or at least that's my interpretation!

On the late missions, computer buildings seem to appear not connected to other buildings, and the computer seems able to build a lot from one or two loads of tiberium, but as you can't see how much cash the computer has, it's hard to tell the level or nature of the "advantage" it has. It doesn't seem to be a big problem, and I suspect it's the later missions where the odds are stacked a bit more on the computer's side (maybe it gets more tiberium per harvester load, for example). It would be nice to be able to set the level of the advantage though, and thus the difficulty level.

The AI isn't as dumb as Warcraft. You can't repeatedly entice enemy units onto your amassed defence (archers and catapults in Warcraft). If you play very defensively then a tactic close to this might work, but you have to go on the attack to win most missions. You have to plan attacks and raids carefully, as usually unless your attack is a killer blow to their base (knocking out a vital building) then your efforts are probably going to waste. Different types of units are suitable for different jobs.

As in Warcraft, the AI throws little (if you're lucky) packs of units at you to harass you while you build up your base, or in a more open encounter you'll often find units lurking behind trees - if you're not prepared one grenadier or bazooka/rocket unit can cause a lot of heartache. Overall I find C&C; a stiffer challenge than Warcraft, and battles can take much longer. While some missions can be won in half an hour, it's more normal to take two or three hours, or more when you mess up and need to restart or restore from a save file.

The Coolest Unit

There are many nominations here. The NOD scout bike moves like the wind and has dual rocket launchers, very nice for sussing out the lie of the land. The GDI heavy rocket launcher has a huge range and a devastating effect. The NOD obelisk of light is an awesome defensive weapon (though once you're relying on it it's probably too late for you!). The NOD stealth tank with its cloaking ability is an excellent scouting and harvester-busting unit.

However, my clear winner is the GDI commando. He costs a big 1000 cash, more than a medium or stealth tank, but he's incredible fun to use. So much so that one GDI mission (six) is dedicated to him; you have to take out a NOD building/structure (you have to work out which one) with just one man on your side for the whole mission. He has to take out SAM sites to allow his transport chopper to arrive, then he's taken on nearer to the target zone.

Just one shot from the commando will kill any infantry at range, and his "field of view" is much more than regular infantry so he'll see them before they see him (and this makes him useful for exploring the blacked out unknown terrain). While idle he smokes a cigar, and he has a few great catchphrases like "no problem" (reminds me of Fidel in Jagged Alliance), "heh heh heh" (after a kill) and "I gotta present for ya" (before planting his C4 explosives). This is a great example of the detail in the game, despite the initial disappointment of no SVGA.

The Plot

The game does have a plot to link the missions, and this is executed very well with the cut scenes between the missions. This adds a lot to the game's aura, and as each mission finishes you're eagerly awaiting the next twist or turn in the storyline. Not giving too much away, the early GDI missions see you struggling when your funding is cut after NOD frame you for destroying a civilian village (around about mission 5). Meanwhile NOD too have their problems, or at least Seth does (before mission 8). As the plot thickens, the missions get very hard - one very late GDI mission sees you start on a tiny island with no room to build a base, and before you can blink you're under attack and under threat of a nuke strike.

It's interesting that while NOD are portrayed as the bad guys, they're definately more fun to play. Perhaps I just don't like the smarmy smile of the GDI leader. Which side is stronger to play is not clear, as each has its strengths and I think overall they're quite well balanced. It is worth noting that in net play there is a tendency for people to pick GDI, but it's quite easy to win or lose as either side! When starting out, GDI is probably easier, but to an experienced player I think NOD has more potential.

Moving from mission to mission reminds me of Syndicate, in that you can pick your next target country to fight in. For GDI this is the European theater (culminating as it happens in what was Yugoslavia), for NOD it's Africa. As you go through the game you get a cumulative score maintained, with efficiency and leadership ratings (which I can't quite figure out the formulae/logic for yet). All, as usual, presented slickly and efficiently.

Network Play

As I said above, the network play is where I feel C&C; really shines. Up to 4 players can link over an IPX network (so if you can room Doom over the net, you can probably run this) or you can play modem/serial head-to-head. Running netplay is quite easy to do, well documented in the manual, and very robust - the manual does suggest that all machines are DX2/66's or better though.

To start a game, one player sets the game conditions, namely the map, the tech level, initial starting cash, what type of game to play (one fun option is "capture the flag"), whether crates are in play (crates can be found which contain soldiers, nukes, airstrikes, cash, or if you're unlucky a booby trap), and what computer opponents to use, if any. The only drawback with computer opponents are that they have no bases, and don't seem to build any, ie. they just harass.

In game you can offer/form alliances which stops your units attacking your ally's units. While all vs all is the most fun, it's also very entertaining to play two on two, using the message-sending facility to liven up proceedings (sadly messages can only be very short though). It's probably the best net game I've played in a long time, and while there are some drawbacks, a typical game will run for about an hour and time will just fly by.

One advantage in net play is that you can build a comms centre early on, which gives a radar scan of the areas you have explored. Fog of war in C&C; is like that of Warcraft - once you've seen an area you can see it forever, which makes scouting the area around your opponent's base a valuable exercise. (Apologies for the lack of netplay screenshots, but the screendump software didn't like my IPX emulator).

The only niggles are that the game takes about 5 or 10 minutes to get rolling (the build & explore stage) and that with two on two it can become a race to the super-weapon, rather like Warcraft with magicians/demons (while one super-weapon isn't fatal, two in quick succession can be!). However, C&C; has enough potential winning strategies to allow for all manner of deviousness. A favourite is to sneak in an engineer in an APC or helicopter; if you can get an engineer into an enemy building it becomes yours, and you can use it or sell it (if your opponent doesn't capture it back first). Overall, net play is a real blast for relaxing after work, and is quite an effective way to find out someone's true character...

If Only ...

Despite the otherwise excellent nature of this game, there are a few "if onlies" which had they been fixed before release might have made C&C; an even better game.

First is the lack of SVGA graphics in battle. The concensus on the net is that this would require so much extra CPU power that C&C; would not have run on anything short of a Pentium. While that argument holds a lot of water, I've seen Warcraft 2, and that manages it fine on a DX2/66. Perhaps the fact that C&C; has been evolving over a long period explains the faithfulness to plain VGA. C&C; does look good, but how much better would it look in SVGA?

Some missions are quite a pig. I don't mind the tough missions, but many seem to require you to play them once or twice to find out what to do, and as they don't seem to be randomised in any way it feels a bit like one of those adventure games where you keep dying and have to redo bits. At least you can save at any point, so you can "experiment" a bit. The apparent lack of any cheat codes doesn't help - if someone finds them let me know - the word from Westwood is there are none! There are no difficulty levels, so no way to make a mission harder or easier.

There's no random mission facility. Warcraft had some sort of random encounter builder, so there was some replay value after you'd finished the game from both sides. C&C; has nothing like this, and like Warcraft no way to enter at a certain level to replay it later, you have to have a saved game to use.

Some things in the interface are a bit clunky. One that really is annoying, but probably is there for gameplay balance, is that to load an APC with men you have to load each man individually; ideally you could load up just the selected troops, but unfortunately you have to put each soldier in one at a time. Another is that harvesters often harvest in dangerous places unless you direct them yourself; luckily they're well armoured but you need to be on your toes.

These aren't huge complaints, but in turn they add up, leaving a slight feeling that C&C; could have been more. No doubt extra mission packs may be released, and maybe patches with them, but I am really nitpicking here on an otherwise excellent product.

Summary

C&C; is an awesome game, and exceptional fun. If you're a fan of Dune II or Warcraft then this one will be a winner. If on the other hand you find real time strategy games too hard and fast to handle, C&C; is certainly far from easy to complete, and the later levels are very tough. This might lead to a lot of frustration, unless you can find a local opponent for net, serial or modem head-to-head play. You might instead want to give Dune II a shot first; the graphics are poor, but the gameplay is great, and the price is probably only $10 or so.

It's perhaps no shock that I highly recommended Command and Conquer. The presentation and cut scenes are superb, the gameplay on the whole is well paced, and the action can be pulsating. As a 4-player network game it's at its best, but in single player "campaign" mode it will give many hours of entertainment. It may not be game of the year, but it will run the opposition very close, and it's worthy of a place on anyone's PC game shelf.

Review By GamesDomain

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